By Catherine Coles
Coles Notes
Ever since The Glass Castle (or was it Angela’s Ashes?), readers have been parched for memoirs about dysfunctional families. Maybe it’s about gaining insight into cultures, lifestyles or perspectives different from one’s own… or maybe it’s just voyeurism. All I know is that I too am frequently drawn to intimate, first-person stories of challenge, struggle, and (eventually) triumph over quirky childhoods. I have read plenty of family memoirs even in just the past few months, including the following favourites.
Jeanette Winterson has been a well-known author since she released her semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in the 1980s. In her new book Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, Winterson goes full-autobiographical. She discusses her childhood growing up in an adoptive family in Manchester in the 1960s and 70s. They were poor, like most of the people around them, and this meant a lack of warmth, nourishment and indoor toilets. She was an only child, her parents had a loveless marriage, and her mother was a religious zealot – this didn’t bode well for Jeanette, a lesbian and bibliophile who was not interested in living a conventional life. Thankfully, through her love of reading, writing and her public library, she was able to find her own place in the world – but not without some hard times along the way. This memoir was one third about Winterson’s fraught relationship with her mother, one third about her mental health struggles, and one third about the power of reading.
What Remains: Object Lessons in Love and Loss by Karen Von Hahn is primarily set in Toronto’s toniest neighbourhoods circa 1970s. This family memoir focuses on the author’s impossibly glamorous, emotionally unstable mother. It reminded me quite a bit of They Left Us Everything, a memoir by Plum Johnson as both books follow adult children and their relationships with their aging parents (in the throes of dementia in some cases) and how it feels to downsize an entire lifetime’s worth of possessions once the parents are gone. Every chapter has focus on a different object of her mother’s affection — a string of pearls, her mother’s perfume, her mother’s favourite brand of cigarettes, etc. Von Hahn uses the objects as a jumping off point for revisiting her childhood as well as memories from the more recent past, around the time when her mother’s health began to fail. She is very critical of her high-drama mother but also a bit in awe of her. The result is a well-balance glimpse into the imperfect life of a woman who, paradoxically, lived for perfection.
You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie is mostly about the author’s early life growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington. Alexie’s most famous novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was semi-autobiographical while this memoir, just published this past spring, finally gives his fans the whole story. Alexie uses a very unconventional writing style here – he drifts back and forth between and poetry and prose as well as between his childhood and the current day. The thread that keeps it all together is his mother, an enigmatic woman who likely lived through trauma and, in turn, inflicted a fair amount of trauma upon her children. She was a liar and a manipulator but she was also a respected member of her tribe and a tireless provider for her family. Following her death in 2015, Alexie had a lot of emotional baggage to sift through – and he uses this book as a channel for this process.
You can reserve these titles at your branch of the County of Lennox and Addington Libraries or online at www.CountyLibrary.ca.
Catherine Coles is the Manager of Library Services for L&A County.