Merry Wanderer of the Night:
memoir

I picked up Memory of Trees for no other reason than the subtitle A Daughter's Story of a Family Farm. I love reading about farms and agriculture, but it's rare that I see a story from the point of view of a daughter. I was especially intrigued because that is what I mostly write about-- Iowa agriculture from a daughter's point of view. Gayla Marty writes about her family's Minnesota farm during the sixties and seventies. She watches as the farms around her become more industrial and watches her own family's farm come to an end. She punctuates the end of each section with a little vignette on a tree from her life. The book is nonfiction, but its really poetry.

"North, east, south, west. North is the pasture behind the barn and the lane along the fence that leads the cows to the woods. East are the railroad tracks and highway. South is town, three miles away. You can see the white towers of the mill across the swamp and fields. West is Gramma's house, which is also Uncle and Auntie's; just beyond it is the woodshed, then the orchard, then the creek flowing under the road into the swamp. In springtime the creek is swollen, the swamp turns into a lake a quarter mile wide" (4).

I love stories about the Midwest but I never see them and I certainly never see them done well. Marty captures the essence of rural Midwest life so well it almost brought me to tears. I've always wanted a book that showed me my life and this was it. The one book that really captured it all for me. I had an extremely intense connection with this book because Marty was able to get the time and place of her story exactly right. By the end of the book I felt like I grew up with her.

Her exploration of place goes beyond the Midwest to farms in Switzerland and Tanzania where she traveled late in high school and early in college. She sees everything through the eyes of a farmer's daughter, and because I shared that bond with her I felt like I saw these places in the most realistic way.

There were a few issues. I thought the book was a little too slow in parts, although overall I thought the pacing was right on and the slowness fit well with the location. Most of my other problems were with Marty's decisions, which have nothing to do with the writing and really nothing to do with her either. It was more about me projecting my own desires onto her life.

This is a book I seem to be recommending to everyone lately even though I have a feeling not everyone will love it. If you're a farmer's daughter though, and you love that about yourself, I really think this is a must read.

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David Small's father was a doctor who thought he could cure him through radiation. Instead the radiation made things worse and gave his son cancer. Rather than telling David his parents sent him into the operating room where David emerged voiceless after a vocal chord was removed. He thought the surgery would just be minor. David expressed himself through drawing and years later you can tell it paid of because the drawings in Stitches: A Memoir

are some of the most beautiful I have seen in any graphic memoir.

You can imagine how many emotions are portrayed in this book and what is truly amazing is how Small does this without words. He uses negative space and tiny changes in body language to tell the reader how each character is feeling. There isn't a lot of writing in this book but I came away from the story feeling like I knew the characters just as well as those in my favorite novels. Even though many pages were wordless I found myself looking at each panel longer than I would have had there been words. I really explored the intricacies of every drawing to help me understand the story. In some ways I liked the wordless panels more.

Anyone interested in memoirs or medical stories should definitely read this, but even if you're not interested in either of those things I still think this one is worth a try. It really transcends those two labels--by which I mean it's just a beautiful story. Small pulls you into his world much like he pulls himself into the paper he's drawing on. He doesn't judge anyone in his family for their choices, even though it would be easy to do, and manages to make you sympathize with all of them. In this way he acknowledges the private lives and thoughts of every person and in turn the importance of giving each human a chance for understanding.

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There has been a lot of talk about memoirs lately, most of it has been negative. Even though I pride myself on loving nonfiction I'll admit I've moved away from memoirs over the last couple of years. There are just so many poorly written ones and too many celebrity publicity stunts. Devotion seemed like it could be different, if for no other reason than I was interested in the story. Dani Shapiro writes about her experiences trying to find her faith again, both in a religious and personal sense. I think a lot of people go through this drifting feeling, the kind of feeling that forces you to look for some answers. Somewhere. Shapiro has had a lot of loss in her life. Her father died early, she never had a good relationship with her mother, and she came scarily close to losing her son. When it seems like everything has gone wrong it's very easy to become faithless, which Shapiro does early on in her life. Through Yoga and meditation she begins to try and find some quiet, which eventually leads her back to the religion of her heritage: Judaism.

When I started this I was a little worried it would be another Tales of a Female Nomad fiasco. A book I wanted to like, but just couldn't bring myself to agree with. Instead I was inspired. They say if you didn't like a book it probably wasn't written for you. I could see a lot of people wouldn't like this book, but Devotion came to me at just the right time. While I haven't necessarily been struggling with religion I have been struggling with turning the constant worrying and anxiety off. I've had problems with turning into myself and figuring out what is going on. In short, I could really relate to Shapiro.

As I skim through this book and look at the sections I underlined, I realize I read this book as a kind of devotional. Picking out things I found inspiring, muttering to myself Remember this every day as I turned the page.

"Writers often say that the hardest part of writing isn't the writing itself; it's the sitting down to write. The same is true of yoga, meditation, and prayer. The sitting down, the making space. The doing. It sounds so simple, doesn't it? Unroll the mat. Sit cross-legged on the floor. Just do it. Close your eyes and express a silent need, a wish, a moment of gratitude. What's so hard about that? Except--it is hard. The usual distractions-- the clutter and piles of life-- are suddenly, unusually enticing." (117)

I'm not going to pretend this is a book for everyone, because it certainly is not. But if you've found yourself grappling with any of the questions I mentioned above, if the passage I shared speaks to you, if you're just looking for a relatable read, I think you should give Devotion a try. You might surprised by it. Not everyone is interested in religion, but for me reading is a kind of meditation. Books are what I turn to when I need to figure things out. In that way I could really relate to Shapiro, and I thoroughly enjoyed her memoir.

The author of this book is very enthusiastic about doing Skype chats with book groups, follow this link if you are interested! To read more reviews of this book check out the TLC Book Tour schedule.

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Sarah Silverman wet the bed until she was a teenager, and from that humiliation she gained some of the emotional insight she needed to become a comedian.The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee

chronicles her younger years as a bedwetter and her adult years as a comedian. She is forthcoming about her faults, but since she often writes from the persona she creates for her stand-up we know we're not necessarily getting all of Silverman. The book is laugh out loud funny at times but Silverman still manages to make you think about race and tolerance.

The book seems to be a little confused about what it wants to be. Is it a memoir? An essay collection? Humor writing? I think it's some hybrid of the three. The book isn't as funny as her stand-up and at times feels more heartfelt. She makes the move to ask serious reflexive questions, but then she drops them and keeps moving to the next chapter. I wish she would have explored some of her questions more but it seemed like she didn't feel comfortable being truly reflexive, which is why this book doesn't really work as a memoir or an essay collection.

While the form was confusing and possibly incomplete, I found that I enjoyed the book simply because it was quick and funny. Silverman is a great storyteller and she has quite a few stories worth telling. I also loved how she played with the idea of a book by writing her own foreword, midword, and afterword. Yes, you read that right, midword. Halfway through the book she interjects, addresses the audience directly to ask what they think so far, and then moves forward with the rest of the book. She also makes the reader hyper-aware that this is a book and not everything in it is necessarily true but adding email conversations highlighting this. Of course then we're forced to ask if the email conversations are true either.

I read the ebook version of this and I was a little frustrated with how small some of the images were. She has scanned images from her childhood diaries but you can't even read them on the ebook version. I'm unsure of how they look in the actual book, but I'm fairly certain they are at the very least legible.

I give The Bedwetter a C.

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I've become obsessed with drawing recently. I used to draw all the time in high school and when I got to college I just stopped. I can't explain it. Luckily I just go Make Yourself Happy by Lucy Knisley while I was in Chicago from this great store called Quimby's Bookstore. Make Yourself Happy was a staff recommendation, and even though I couldn't really figure out what the book was about I really wanted to buy a graphic novel I'd never even seen before. So I got this one. Apparently Lucy Knisley is most well known for her graphic travelogue, French Milk

, which I've heard of but never read. Make Yourself Happy is a collection of journals from 2009-2010, which cover her life as a 24-year-old graduate student, published artist, and all around awesome person.

What I most enjoyed about Make Yourself Happy was Knisley's outright honesty. She loves She's the Man, Pride and Prejudice, she reads romance, she feels bad about herself, she's selfish, and she is lazy. Basically, she is a twenty-something girl living in Chicago-- which was an experience I could totally relate to. Knisley is easy to love because she's just like your best friend. She doesn't try to be hip, she doesn't try to be anything. I love the inner dialogue in the HourLies, which are a series of short comments for each hour of the day. They are two panels usually, and just show the most important things from that hour. These were great because they made me think back over the course of my day and realize how many observations I could have saved through writing or drawing, but didn't.

The longer portion of the book is a travelogue of a trip to Paris Lucy took with her boyfriend during the summer. She is totally paranoid in the beginning, attempting to plan outfits that will make her look romantic and beautiful, only to get to Paris and spend a lot of the time in her underwear (understandable). In the travelogue she includes found objects, like a written poem, as well as larger, more detailed drawings. The travelogue appears about 3/4 of the way through the book, which is perfect timing because we get a break from her regular routine and see something different, but we've also gotten to known her up to that point so can understand her more fully in this new environment.

I really loved Make Yourself Happy and I'm quickly becoming obsessed with Lucy Knisley's work, which you should check out at her website. Make Yourself Happy is self-published by Knisley and can be purchased from her website for $15. Worth every penny.

I give this graphic journal an A.

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Confession time: I watched Father of the Bride

and Father of the Bride 2

on an alternating daily fashion for at least one year of my life. I woke up and watched as much of that day's movie before I went to school, then came home and finished it after school, and did the same thing the next day, and the next day, and the next for one year. 365 days. Which means I've seen each movie a minimum of 183 times. I'm honestly not kidding about this. I was around eight when the obsession consumed me. I just loved those movies, and I adored Steve Martin. Mostly because he reminded me of my dad. I'm not a huge fan of stand-up comedy, but I was interested in Steve Martin's autobiography Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

simply because he had such a huge impact on my childhood, and in turn my life. I read his novella Shopgirl a year ago, so I knew that Steve Martin was a fantastic writer. Within the first ten pages of this book I knew I was in for something great.

Actually on the first page he shines, "My most persistent memory of standup is of my mouth being in the present and my mind being in the future; the mouth speaking the line, the body delivering the gesture, while the mind looks back, observing, analyzing, judging, worrying, and then deciding when and what to say next"(1). I've never been a stand-up comic, but that description instills the fear and heightened awareness he must have experienced every single night. He ends the chapter in a similarly fantastic fashion, describing why this book is a biography and not an autobiography: "In a sense, this book is not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know. Yes, these events are true, yet sometimes they seemed to have happened to someone else, and I often felt like a curious onlooker or someone trying to remember a dram. I ignored my stand-up career for twenty-five years, but now, having finished this memoir, I view this time with surprising warmth. One can have, it turns out, an affection for the war years" (3).

The rest of the biography relays the events of Steve Martin's life, and it must be said that the first half of his life covered is rather boring. This isn't really a great biography to read if you want to hear a really interesting, fabulous story about a celebrity. Martin worked at Disneyland, he didn't get along with his father, he liked doing magic tricks. He's different, but not astounding. All of that said, I felt like I knew Martin pretty well by the end of this biography simply through his writing. He can be repetitive, and there were times I wondered why he included the information he did-- but overall I loved this book.

I give this biography an A.

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I picked up The Impostor's Daughter: A True Memoir

by Laurie Sandell on a whim during the Iowa City Book Festival. I was attracted by the bright colors and contemporary way of drawing, plus I was really pleased when I opened the book up and saw it was a graphic memoir instead of a written memoir. The story is about Sandell's father, an extremely intelligent man with a Green Beret, PhD, and thousands of unbelievable stories. When Sandell grows up she tries to live up to her dad's larger than life by traveling the world and then finally settling down as a celebrity interviewer. Through being an interviewer she discovers she is great at getting people to tell their stories, so she takes these skills to her father. Along the way though, she discovers that her father's stories were not real. And if they weren't real, then how real is she?

The Imposter's Daughter is a great story and I flipped through the pages at the speed of lightning to find out what wasn't true about her father and what was. Really, the story is unbelievable. I can't imagine going through my whole life believing one thing, and then growing up to find out my whole life had been a fraud. In some ways I think we all experience this, we grow up to find out our parents weren't always completely honest with us, but Sandell's life takes it to a new extreme. As far as good stories to tell, I think Sandell's is one worth telling.

But I didn't really think it was a great memoir. Sandell's character lacked depth, and I felt like I only knew her on the surface. She was young and loved her father, she grew older and a little wild, she settled down into a dream job, and then she fought with her family over finding out the truth about her father. The last phrase in the description is "who am I?" and I don't think I really know who Sandell is at all. And as a graphic memoir, my favorite parts of the book were the drawings she included from her childhood. Those said a lot more about her and were better vehicles than any of the drawings in the rest of the book. I often felt like the images were repeated on a page simply because she ran out of room for the text, and that's not what graphic memoirs should be. Each box should how us something new, a new emotion or feeling, and I think Sandell failed at that.

My general consensus is that it is worth reading because the story is wild, but I wouldn't go out and buy this one. I give it a C.

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I finally read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

after hearing nothing but praise of it for the past year. And the praise is deserved, because this graphic memoir is Awesome with a capital A. Alison Bechdel's story is one of growing up with a family who doesn't always appear to be what they are. Her clean home was full of antiques her father collected that made it appear to be a different time period inside than it was outside the door. Her parents were married by rarely spoke to each other, her mother spent most of her time acting in plays, and her father spent most of his time entertaining adolescent boys. Alison finds out about her father's homosexuality when she comes out in college as a lesbian. This creates a bond between them that is strange and hard to explain, but Bechdel succeeds in creating a story that helps make you sympathize with everyone in it, even with their flaws.

The drawing is fairly simple but as an almost photographic quality to it. The way she places objects and fills rooms with so many specific pieces gives it a snapshot feel. I love how she had boxes to point out things in the photos you might not see, or to give you a better understanding of what was going on. I also like how the story is Bechdel's own memoir, her internal story, but sometimes the dialogue contradicts that story. It's just another way of showing how unreliable memory can be, or how my memory is different from your memory. Bechdel is also completely honest about herself. She admits that she wanted to get a rise out of her parents by coming out as a lesbian, and that she was disappointed when she didn't even though her primary concern should have been her deeply depressed mother.

This is a great graphic memoir that deals with a difficult and confusing subject. It's different from other coming out stories because it not only deals with Bechdel's own discovery of her sexuality but with the discovery of her father's hidden sexuality. It's also a story of how easy it is to not know the members of your own family. At one point in the story Bechdel illustrates how everyone in the house was in a different room doing a completely different thing. I know my family does this all the time, and I'm sure most families do. Does anyone care what is going on outside of their room? Probably not.

I give this graphic memoir an A.

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In my post about the Audiobook I mentioned that The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid

was my first audiobook. For this review I'll talk a little bit about the book itself and then I'll talk about the actual audiobook. The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid is a memoir about Bill Bryson's childhood in Des Moines, Iowa, during the 1950's. It's about Des Moines, but not just about Des Moines. It's about a time when moms stayed at home and made meals out of magazines, kids could ride their bikes downtown without parental supervision, and all the restaurants you went to were locally owned. Basically it's about a world that doesn't exist today, and maybe about a world that never really did exist in real life.

A disclaimer, I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, too, although I grew up in the 1990's. Because of that I enjoyed this book a lot. It was insane for me to hear about all the restaurants and stores that used to exist in Des Moines and are no longer there. Des Moines has changed a lot even in my lifetime. The East Village used to be a really dumpy somewhat terrifying area, and now it has tons of hip boutiques and ethnic restaurants. I worked in the East Village this summer and I never ran into a pan handler, which used to be unheard of. Some of the things he talks about I knew existed at one point, or they closed during my lifetime, but most of these things I'd never heard of, never thought of, never seen. Bryson talks about how Des Moines used to be, and how America used to be, this wholesome, local business thing. And while he was a part of that, he was also a bit of an outsider. Both of his parents worked, which was unusual for Des Moines at the time, and they both worked as newspaper writers, which was a different career than most people in Des Moines had at the time. Because of this I think he can give a unique perspective on that world and how people, or even how he himself, reacted to his family.

The audiobook itself is wonderful. It's narrated by Bill Bryson who is obviously from Iowa so he says very Iowan things, like warsh instead of wash, but he's lived in England for quite awhile and so he has a bit of a British accent as well. He is a great reader and has great delivery with his jokes. I listened to this audiobook while walking or driving and I caught myself getting stared at because I was laughing hysterically at what he was saying. It feels a lot more like he is telling you about his life than reading a book he wrote to you.

I give this audiobook an A.

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"Celluloid is about dreams, movies are about fantasy, and motion picture are about things you couldn't possibly even imagine in your wildest dreams, brought vividly to life in front of your very eyes" (xv). This is how Emmett James' memoir Admit One: My Life in Film

begins, and based on that quote alone I had fairly high expectations for this book. Each chapter in the narrative begins with a movie, the very first is the Jungle Book, a quick synopsis of the movie and then moves into James' own story. The memoir is divided into two parts. The first, Coming Attractions, is about his life growing up in and outside of London as a child deeply obsessed with movies and everything that went along with him. The second half, Feature Presentation, is about his life as a struggling actor in Hollywood, trying to make a career out of his childhood passion.

I loved the way this book was set up, I just wish it would have been executed a little bit better. There were times in most of the chapters in the book where I had a hard time remembering what movie he started talking about. The first few chapters stayed with the movie alright, but the tangents kept getting more confusing as the book went on. It felt like a gimmick, because most of the movies really had nothing to do with the story he was telling. I got so caught up in trying to make a connection to the movie that I could enjoy the great storytelling and humor that was happening in the book. And let's be clear about that, this is a funny book. James is very funny, comparing his mother to the wicked witch in the Wizard of Oz and talking about one of his first acting jobs dressing up as a woman. He pokes fun at others, but he also pokes fun at himself and that is a saving grace in this book.

But even though he is a good storyteller, and he can make me laugh so hard my abs get a good workout, I wish there was a little more substance to this story. Yeah it's interesting, but I think there were things James could have pushed a little harder. He begins to in a later chapter about working on the movie the Titanic; "The joy, excitement, and arrogance I had felt upon leaving Los Angeles had been quickly replaced by an overwhelming sense of guilt and sadness. It struck me as more than a little ironic that I was making my way to participate in a film surrounding the horrors of an unforgiving class system. Here, now, in front of me eyes, nearly one hundred years later, was the most blatant wealth and poverty line I had every physically experienced" (156). He begins to push here, into the falsity of movies, celebrities, and film making, but he pulls away too quickly. This is something that I really struggled with towards the end of the book. It seemed like the story got too stuck int he gimmick of the movies that it couldn't explore throughout the book what was finally found at the end. James says he didn't want to be a celebrity, but he wanted to be an actor. And there is a difference, one that I don't ever really think about. He talks about how his views have changed. The ending was the most interesting part of the memoir. I wanted to transplant some of that deep thinking into the first half of the book, which basically just felt like childhood stories that went nowhere.

This book got a C. I received the book from a publicist.

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I protested vehemently and announced that I was never going to become anything but myself, that I was of the clan of Peter Pan and we did not grow up (10). Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were best friends at the height of 1969, when they lived at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City and rubbed elbows with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Robert and Patti were both struggling artists before, during, and after this period, and beyond that they were struggling young adults trying to understand a culture of young people who were somewhat like them but somewhat different at the same time. They were sometimes romantically involved and sometimes not, but they were always close. They were family.

I heard about Just Kids in March when I was listening to a two part podcast on KCRW's Bookworm with Micahel Silverblatt. Even though the podcast between Silverblat and Smith totaled 58 minutes I still found myself constantly returning to it. I rarely return to podcasts after listening to them, so the fact that I was so entranced by Patti Smith told me I really had to read this book. Her voice was so strong in the podcast, and I was pleased to find I could easily hear her voice in her memoir. I was also pleased to find she was just as easy to relate to in her book as she was on the podcast, which is amazing considering she has lived an incredible life. I've read a lot of music memoirs in the past, and I used to be kind of into Patti Smith (although not as much as earlier rockstars like Joplin or Jim Morrison) but nothing quite like Just Kids. This isn't so much a memoir about her time as a rock star; in fact, she never really gets into her music career. Instead what is found here is a relationship between two lost young people who found support in one another. Patti Smith is honest and unapologetic, but you can still see the young, wandering girl in her. And the woman has got it together. She sees things and puts them into words better than a lot of writers I've read: "I craved honesty, yet found dishonesty in myself" (65) and "Apart, we were able to see with even greater clarity that we didn't want to be without each other" (80) are just two such examples.

I had two little, little beefs with this book though. In my opinion Robert kind of fell out of the picture about 3/4 of the through the book. I think this is because their relationship changed at this point, but I still wanted to know a little more about him, even if it was just what Smith was thinking about him. I also felt like when Robert fell out of the picture Smith lost her unapologetic voice a little bit. I'm fine with that, but I thought it should be acknowledged a little more. And sometimes Smith goes off on a bit of a tangent once in awhile. So the book wasn't perfect for me, just not quite there. But I still really enjoyed it as a Patti Smith fan, as a nonfiction writer, and as a reader.

The book is also scattered with images of Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe, so it just didn't seem right to me to not include such a picture in my review.

I also think I should mention that Robert Mapplethorpe's art is highly sexual and Smith is honest about this, so there are some fairly graphic descriptions in the memoir. This memoir earned a B.

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When I heard about Dead End Gene Pool

by Wendy Burden I was attracted to it mostly because it was a memoir and I have really been failing on the memoir front lately, even though it is probably my favorite genre. The memoir recounts Burden's childhood, which was mostly unsupervised and full of wealth. According to the synopsis, "For generations the Burdens were one of the wealthiest families in New York, thanks to the inherited fortune of Cornelius 'The Commodore' Vanderbilt. By 1955, the year of Wendy's birth, the Burdens had become a clan of overfunded, quirky and brainy, steadfastly chauvinistic, and ultimately doomed bluebloods on the verge of financial and moral decline-and were rarely seen not holding a drink." I had to quote the back of the book on this one, because I don't think I could have described it any better myself. Personally, I had never heard of the Vanderbilts or the Burdens before, but I am sure they were very wealthy people.

The majority of the story is about Wendy's mother. At a young age Wendy's father committed suicide and left her mom free to live any way she wanted. The life she chose was a revolving door of men stapled by her favorite cocktails and days lounging in the sun. She is clearly an intelligent woman though, during the memoir she earns a Ph. D and studies ancient coins, but there seems to be something not quite right with her. Wendy complains about her mom a lot in this book, and rightfully so. In many instances her mother makes fun of her for being chubby, and she is constantly battling Wendy for her youth, even though she apparently has a wicked hot bod. Wendy goes the opposite direction of her mother (don't we all) and decides to ditch her mom's micro mini skirts and saran wrap dresses for long hippie skirts and earthiness. It's kind of hard to not hate her mom, especially when she tells Wendy she has to figure out how to deal with being a woman in her father's family and comes off as totally emotionless about her husband's death. At the same time though, I don't think Burden did enough to try to humanize her mother in the memoir. Maybe this is just something that has been drilled into me from nonfiction writing classes, but I do think it's important to create three dimensionality in characters, especially in nonfiction because your characters are real people. There are some attempts made later in the book, but for me it was just too little too late.

That's not to say Burden doesn't have a great voice. She has a biting wit, as evidenced by her commentary on the smallest parts of her life; "Modernism is such an inhospitable decor scheme for drinkers. There's a reason the classic English drawing room has remained soft and downy throughout the ages." Sometimes she makes really interesting comments on growing up as well, and for me these were the moments of the book where her writing really worked. One of my favorite quotations was this: "When you leave home, you instinctually modify the passage of time so that you, the child, develop at a normal rate, while your parents, and in my case my grandparents, age at about ten times that." I really enjoyed getting to know her throughout the book. That being said, there were times when I couldn't tell if I was actually supposed to feel bad for her because, as an example, her grandfather offered her a trip someplace even though he knew she couldn't leave, or if she was going for self-deprecation. I'm leaning towards the idea that I was supposed to feel bad for her, and I just didn't. Honestly, I think a little more personal reflection was really needed in this memoir to balance out the jibes she makes at everyone else.

This book earned a C. I received a copy of this book from a publicist.

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