memoir

Grief and healing in “H Is for Hawk”

/ Lou

I love it when a book makes me interested in something I never thought I’d care about.

For example, The Orchid Thief’s brilliant exposition on the history of both orchids and the state of Florida coupled with a real-life hunt for the elusive ghost orchid kept me enthralled page after page. A Deadly Wandering used a texting-and-driving accident as a narrative thread for looking at how the law adapts to new technology and how our brain tries (and often fails) to the do the same. And in Factory Man, I became acquainted with the American furniture industry and the fiery figure who fought the way foreign competition was affecting his industry.

Another book I’ll add to this list of favorites is Helen Macdonald’s powerful, poignant H Is for Hawk. If you were to ask me if I’d like to read a book that’s partly about the history of falconry, focused especially on the temperamental goshawk, partly about the life of author T.H. White of The Sword and the Stone fame, and partly a grief memoir following Macdonald’s father’s sudden death, I’m not sure I’d sign right up.

And yet, I find myself years after having finished the book still thinking about it, from time to time. I also find myself still looking with a new respect at the red-tailed hawks circling and soaring over my backyard — one, last week, with a scrambling squirrel held tightly in its talons.

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Macdonald’s ability to create a story that moves through these various topics astounds. At times, I simply found myself marveling at how she did it, but mostly I wanted to learn more and more about hawks and about her and about her father and about the reclusive T.H. White.

Macdonald’s father helped foster an interest in the outdoors and in falconry in her from a young age. We learn of his unexpected death early in the book and join her as she journeys through grief and despair and anger and disillusionment.

She writes, “Here’s a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It’s from the Old English bereafian, meaning ‘to deprive of, take away, seize, rob.’ Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn’t to be shared, no matter how hard you try.”

If you’ve been through an unexpected death, and particularly the sudden death of a parent, you will relate to this and to so much that follows. While it’s true that death and grief are specific to each individual, and sharing it perfectly isn’t ever attainable, there are some broad similarities. Macdonald deals with her grief by adopting and training a goshawk, finding release in the bird’s wildness and in her ability, and struggle, to contain that.

H Is For Hawk reminded me of two other books about grief, and healing it, in part, through the natural world: The Snow Leopard, by Peter Matthiessen, and Wild, by Cheryl Strayed. If you enjoyed either of those, I bet you’d find solace in Macdonald’s book, and vice versa. All three touch on something similar — the need to get out into nature in order to embrace the unimaginable.

Transcending a Difficult Childhood in Lucy Grealy’s “Autobiography of a Face”

/ Lou / 2 Comments

Lucy Grealy’s remarkable memoir, Autobiography of a Face, was published over twenty years ago. Discovering it now leaves me wondering how I missed it all this time, but grateful that I finally read it.

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Grealy was diagnosed at age nine with Ewing’s sarcoma, an extremely rare form of bone cancer that most often affects children and adolescents. For Grealy, the cancer developed in her jawbone, and the surgery to remove it resulted in the loss of a third of her jaw. Following the surgery, she spent two and a half years undergoing radiation and chemotherapy five days a week. She and her mother made the trek from New Jersey into New York City and back (one hour each way) for that entire time period.

Grealy describes these experiences with precision, putting us into the mindset of a child going through tremendous suffering. She writes about how, at first, she welcomed all the attention, and the break from school and her somewhat volatile home life it provided her. But no one ever actually bothered to explain to her the seriousness of her condition or the extent of the surgery, so she was left, repeatedly, to piece these things together on her own. In fact, it took years before she even realized that Ewing’s sarcoma is a form of cancer.

The surgery left her disfigured, and when she returned to school, she faced the awful cruelty that kids can display, enduring their teasing and taunts. She wanted desperately to fit in, but never felt at ease.

She had to have repeated surgeries on her jaw, as the doctors tried to use various measures to rebuild it and give her a more “normal” appearance. But time after time, these did not go as planned, leaving Grealy feeling even more isolated at school. She, like anyone else, craved acceptance and love, and she came to believe she’d never find either.

It’s in her evocative writing about feeling alone and wanting more than anything to feel connected to her peers that Grealy’s book becomes more than just a specific story about an illness and its aftermath. It becomes something universal, something that I’d guess just about any reader who has been a pre-teen or teenager can relate to. While her situation was undoubtedly extreme, and she faced abuse from her classmates that will break your heart, Grealy captures here what it’s like to be a kid looking for your place in the world.

When she went off to a small liberal arts college, she at last did feel the warmth of acceptance and lack of judgment from her fellow students. Differences were celebrated. It was here she began writing, an outcome we are the richer for.

(Originally published here: http://msbusiness.com/2016/03/book-biz-an-arresting-memoir-about-childhood-illness-and-loneliness/)

Discovering the Mississippi Delta in “Dispatches From Pluto”

/ Lou

It sounds like the start of a classic fish-out-of-water tale: take one man from England who’s been living in New York City, plop him down in a tiny town in the Mississippi Delta, and hilarity ensues. It’s a true story, though, and Richard Grant writes about his adventures in the entertaining and enlightening Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta.

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After befriending Delta native and cookbook author Martha Foose, Grant visits her home stomping grounds and finds himself entranced by the land, the people, and the beauty of it all. The Delta’s languid pace appealed to him, as well, especially coming from NYC’s frenetic, stressful quality of life. Grant persuaded his Arizona-born girlfriend, Mariah, who’d also been living in Manhattan, to move south with him. (She didn’t take much persuading, as they were both burned out on big-city living.) Before you know it, they’re the proud owners of a circa-1910 4-bedroom farmhouse in Pluto, Mississippi.

Right away, they tried to orient themselves in their new Holmes County surroundings, learning the ways of their fellow Delta residents as if undertaking an anthropological study. The neighbors welcomed them with the hospitality you’d expect, filling their calendar with social engagements from elaborate dove hunts to dinners with eccentric characters galore.

Grant and his girlfriend learned how to shoot guns and hunt, how to deal with more mosquitos than they’d ever seen in their lives, how to identify cottonmouths, how to effectively clear weeds for a garden, and how to make home repairs on a hundred-year-old house. They learned new words (like “brake” and “slough”) and explored many of the small towns in the Delta that have seen more prosperous days. Grant toured Parchman, made a friend in Morgan Freeman, visited with bluesman T-Model Ford, and covered Bill Luckett’s campaign for mayor of Clarksdale.

Through it all, Grant writes with an admiration and tenderness for his new home and neighbors. The book’s often riotously funny, particularly when describing real-life crime stories in Greenwood and elsewhere. But Grant’s also thoughtful and earnest in trying to understand race relations in modern-day Mississippi. In one chapter he tackles, for instance, the current abysmal state of affairs of the public schools in the Delta. And he writes movingly about the grinding poverty he sees there.

Grant’s insights as an outsider trying to decipher a new world make this book compelling and also challenging. He’s confronting tough truths and asking hard questions, but from a place of genuine respect and love.

(Originally published here: http://msbusiness.com/2015/12/book-biz-an-englishman-adjusts-to-his-new-mississippi-delta-home/)

“Coming of Age in Mississippi” Still Inspires and Humbles

/ Lou

Reading Anne Moody’s searing autobiography of her time growing up in Wilkinson County, Mississippi, I was struck again and again by her bravery. I’d read Coming of Age in Mississippi before, years ago, but felt drawn to it again recently, and found it just as powerful now as ever.

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Born in poverty and raised by a mother who worked multiple jobs to put food on the family table, Moody shares, in detail, just exactly what it was like growing up poor and black in rural Mississippi in the 1940s and 50s. She worked from an early age to help her siblings and mother, doing housework, yard work, babysitting, and odd jobs for the white families in their community. She explains vividly how, as a child, she grew to recognize but not fully understand the differences between her family and those she worked for. She captures this perplexity and this heartache perfectly.

Just as Moody was entering ninth grade in 1955, Emmett Till was murdered. He was 14 at the time, and so was she. At this point, everything changes. She remains a hard worker and a precocious student, but she’s now committed to fighting for justice and fairness. She finds she can’t be complacent, can’t just accept “things as they are.” It puts her at odds with her mother and many in her family, who fear for her life and theirs, too – a fear that is completely justified.

Moody would eventually attend Tougaloo College, where she was active in the civil rights movement. She participated in the famous Woolworth’s sit-in in downtown Jackson in 1963, where she and two other activists sat calmly for three hours at the lunch counter while an angry mob hit them, yelled at them, and poured ketchup, mustard, and sugar on them. She was resolute.

She saw and experienced more violence, from attacks on peaceful protests she participated in to threats while she was working to encourage black Mississippians to register to vote. Still, she didn’t cave. She didn’t run. She persevered. She recounts, in her book, the horror of hearing about both the murder of Medgar Evers in June 1963 and the Birmingham church bombing in September 1963. The latter happened on her 23rd birthday.

Reading this book places you right in the heart of the civil rights movement, with a remarkably strong woman as your guide. She was bold and outspoken and unafraid.

Moody died in February 2015 at age 74. Thankfully, though, her words, her courageous spirit, and her important legacy live on to inspire future generations.

(Originally published here: http://msbusiness.com/2015/08/book-biz-revisiting-the-life-story-of-a-civil-rights-pioneer/)

Mary Karr’s Mastery on Display in “The Art of Memoir”

/ Lou

Everyone has a story to tell. For some among us, the hope of connecting our own personal story to the larger human narrative drives us to write and share what happened. But even if you, instead, just prefer to read others’ true-life stories, Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir proves to be a thoughtful investigation into the popular literary form.

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Based on thirty years of her own research into and teaching of memoir, and written in Karr’s signature gritty, funny east Texas voice, The Art of Memoir works as both an instruction guide for the willing writer and an exploration into the best memoirs for the hungry reader.

Karr begins the book with, “No one elected me the boss of memoir.” While technically true, she still must be credited in large part with the explosion of the genre’s popularity.

Published twenty years ago, her first memoir, The Liars’ Club, was a revelation. Without a hint of pity or sentimentality, she shared the harrowing tales of her dysfunctional and, at times, violent upbringing in an east Texas oil town, her artistic, alcoholic mother and tough-guy father springing alive from the pages. With love and lots of laughs amidst the pain, it was an honest look at a not-perfect childhood from someone who survived it. She followed that up with Cherry, about her rebellious teen years, and in 2009, with Lit, about her own struggles with alcoholism and eventual conversion to Catholicism. When it comes to memoir, Karr knows what she’s talking about.

She explores all the facets of writing memoir that a budding author should master: developing a voice, choosing details, describing those details effectively to create a living, breathing world in the mind of the reader, and perhaps most vitally, how to handle questions of truth and memory.

Every memoir is by nature subjective and not an objective history of the facts, but that can certainly be tricky territory when it comes to writing about your own past or your family’s past. She touches, too, on the way memory itself works. It’s not a faithful recording of every part of an experience. It’s shaped by the emotions of the event and can be influenced by what others remember and share about what happened. Her advice is to write about the most vivid memories and never, ever make stuff up.

She includes commentary, as well, on many of her own favorite memoirs, and a reading list at the end. Whether you’re a hopeful memoirist or someone who enjoys reading them (or both), there’s much to love and learn from here.

(Originally published here: http://msbusiness.com/2016/01/109574/)

“M Train” a Meditation on Life, Loss, Love

/ Lou / 3 Comments

Patti Smith is a woman of many talents. She’s an accomplished performer, visual artist, and photographer, as well as a punk-rock icon and poet. With the publication of her exceptional memoir Just Kids in 2010, she added National Book Award winner to the list.

In Just Kids (which I liked so much I read it twice within a year) Smith chronicles her life from her blue-collar upbringing in New Jersey through her discovery of her love of music and poetry and art to her eventual move in the 1960s/early 1970s to New York City. There she lived for a time in the Chelsea Hotel surrounded by many of the same musicians, artists, and writers she worshiped. It’s a book that is imbued with a specific time and a specific place, so filled with perfect descriptions of life then that you feel as though you, too, were hanging out at the Chelsea, chatting up Bob Dylan at the bar.

Her newly released follow-up to it, M Train, feels different but somehow similar, permeated instead with Smith’s attachment to her memories and the things and people she’s admired and loved and lost. It’s not a straightforward “this happened and then that happened” memoir. It reads instead as a beautiful look into Smith’s own mind, into her ruminations about the past and her obsessions with certain books, authors, and even TV shows.

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We tag along with her as she travels in the past and in the present; a trip to Japan, a trip to French Guiana, a trip to Berlin, a trip to Mexico, among others. We’re beside her as she visits the graves of Sylvia Plath, Jean Genet, and Arthur Rimbaud, marking these moments with quiet gratitude and respect. We see her Manhattan apartment, filled with photos and talismans from her life, as well as her books and her cats. We sip coffee along with her each morning, notebook and pen in hand, at the small café across from her apartment. We discover, as she does, the beauty of Rockaway Beach, and the unexpected folly of purchasing a falling-down house mere weeks before Hurricane Sandy would strike. (The house, remarkably, was still standing after, though many around it were not.) We feel her pain, years later, after first her husband died and then her brother not long after.

At age 68, it feels like Smith’s taking stock, in a sense, holding on to memories through photos and objects, trying to regain what’s been lost and hold on to what hasn’t been (yet). I think that’s something we can all relate to and Smith gives us her beautiful words to savor as we melt into that melancholy.

“The World’s Largest Man” Delivers Laughs and Heart

/ Lou

Father’s Day may be behind us already this year, but that’s no reason not to let Harrison Scott Key entertain you with tales (some tall) about both his larger-than-life father and his Mississippi upbringing. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and if you’re of a certain age, you’ll reminisce about the time your own dad brought home a three-wheeler for you and simultaneously delighted you and infuriated your mother. (Or is that just me? I guess those things really were pretty dangerous.)

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Key was born in Memphis but his family moved down and out to the country in north Mississippi when he was six. His father, dubbed “Pop” here, will be intimately familiar to many readers in Mississippi and throughout the South. He believed a man’s place was in the woods during hunting season, pre-dawn, gun in hand, waiting to successfully take out many vicious deer or doves. If not the woods, though, the football field was the most appropriate place to be. Or, a man’s place was at the dinner table, where in Key’s family, all the men were served and ate their food before the women were able to enjoy even a bite of their own hard work.

Trouble was, Key was a kid who enjoyed pursuits more suited to the indoors, like reading and drawing. He shared a special bond with his mother, a teacher, who fostered these things in him, but also didn’t wave his father off from trying to make him “a man.” As he writes about his childhood, you feel the intense respect and love he had for his dad, but you also can’t help but appreciate his ongoing bewilderment and frustration. They were about as different as a father and son could be.

Key’s gift for humor and language makes this book an absolute joy to read. His wit and way with words will surprise you and make you laugh out loud. In fact, be prepared for a few strange looks to be shot your way if you’re reading it alone in public somewhere. It’s so worth it, though. I hated when it ended.

Key also has a deft touch when it comes to more tender moments, and you’ll likely be fighting back (perhaps unsuccessfully) a tear or two now and then. For all the outrageous stories, there is an openness here, an honesty about life and family and love that connects all of us, in a way, to Pop. Give this book a read and get to know him yourself. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Postscript: I had the immense pleasure of meeting Harrison Scott Key at Blue Bicycle Books in Charleston, SC recently. He was reading from and signing The World’s Largest Man. He also talked about the sometimes-tricky experience of writing a memoir while many of the people in it are still alive to read what you’ve written about them. He’s incredibly charming and funny. I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed so much at a book event before. If he’s coming to a town near you, I highly suggest you go! I accosted him afterwards and he graciously agreed to this photo with me:
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(Originally published here: http://msbusiness.com/2015/08/book-biz-a-mississippi-father-looms-large-in-this-funny-memoir/)

Jesmyn Ward’s “Men We Reaped” Haunts

/ Lou

To read Jesmyn Ward’s haunting memoir Men We Reaped is to step inside of her pain and grief. It’s impossible not to be affected by it, not to be left breathless, not to have to put the book down now and then for a spell while you recover.

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Ward won a National Book Award back in 2011 for her novel Salvage the Bones. Set over the twelve days leading up to and right after Hurricane Katrina, that book explored the lives and troubles of a poverty-stricken family living in a small town along the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Men We Reaped, minus the hurricane, travels some of the same territory. Here, though, Ward shares the real-life stories of her family and friends as they grew up in and around DeLisle and Gulfport, Mississippi. The book’s driven by the deaths of five young black men Ward was close to. All five of them died, in different and violent ways, within a span of the four years between 2000-2004. Among them was Ward’s beloved younger brother, Joshua.

The book’s a heartbreaking exploration, looking for answers, for connections between the deaths, for some way to make sense out of the clearly senseless. Ward tells us right up front about the five deaths and lets us know she’ll be writing about them in turn, but even though we know what’s coming, it doesn’t make it any less painful. Her gifts as a writer and storyteller are on display with each page, every sentence, every time she makes you wince.

In addition to sharing the stories of these five young men with us, Ward also writes movingly about her childhood and what it was like to grow up poor and black on the Mississippi coast in the late 1970s and 1980s. We learn about her hard-working mother, determined to provide for her children, working as many jobs as one person could to make ends meet. And we hear about Ward’s father, who was a charming man and loved his kids, but also had a wandering eye. We learn, too, about Ward herself and the gift for language and love of reading she showed early in her life.

Ward’s ability to shift from the specific to the general and then back again is one of the most effective things about Men We Reaped. While we, as readers, properly understand it to be her story, it’s also quite clearly a broader one, one steeped in racism, poverty, lack of opportunities, and a lack of empathy. Her story is tragic, but it’s, sadly, not singular. Ward demonstrates this in searing detail, if you’re brave enough to face it.

(Originally published here: http://msbusiness.com/blog/2015/02/05/louann-lofton-unforgettable-mississippi-memoir-resonates/)

“The Empathy Exams” Covers Expansive Ground in an Innovative Way

/ Lou

Leslie Jamison’s arresting collection of essays, The Empathy Exams, graced more than one “best of” list at the end of 2014. After reading it, I can see why. It’s original, often challenging, and an ultimately thought-provoking book.

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Not surprisingly, the quest to understand empathy — what it really means and how we come to experience it — ties all the pieces together here. What’s interesting is the way Jamison approaches it through her writing, coming at the topic from multiple angles. And given the fact that the essays included here were all published elsewhere prior to appearing in this book, the nature of empathy and our expression of it is seems to be something that preoccupies her.

In the opening essay, which gives the book its title, Jamison describes her experience working as a medical actor. These are people who pretend to have symptoms and illnesses so that doctors in training can practice both diagnosing them and interacting with patients. The actors are instructed to grade the doctors on how much they felt they empathized with them (which ultimately tends to be the doctors saying some of the same rote phrases again and again). But Jamison uses this as a jumping-off point to write about some of her own actual medical history and the way she felt doctors responded to her with empathy, or a lack thereof.

The landscapes in The Empathy Exams are expansive, taking the reader from the hills of northern Tennessee for an ultra-marathon to the gang-addled neighborhoods of south central Los Angeles to a violent night in Nicaragua and beyond. We learn, in an uncomfortably up-close and personal kind of way, about Morgellons disease and the plight of people suffering from something that many in the medical community aren’t convinced really exists. We hear about inmates and crime and also about the suffocating existence of Bolivian silver miners, working twelve-hour shifts in mines beneath the highest city in the world.

Jamison takes us to these places and introduces us to these people in an effort to answer what I see as her primary question: how can any of us truly know and feel what it’s like to be another person? We can talk about it with them, we can try to imagine ourselves in their circumstances, we can draw on the repository of similar experiences from our own lives, but we’re never quite sure we’re getting it right. That’s no reason not the try, though. As human beings, we owe that to one another. I believe that’s the overarching message of this compelling book.

(Originally published here: http://msbusiness.com/blog/2015/01/16/louann-lofton-jamison-gives-exploration-empathy-many-angles/)