One With Others (a little book of her days)

book by CD Wright
annotation by Suzanne La Follette

C.D Wright’s One With Others captures Sweet Willie Wine’s Walk Against Fear in 1969 through small town Arkansas. Wright delves into the depths of the civil rights battle, following a white woman named V that gives everything she has to fight for the rights of others. This book-length lyrical essay includes a smattering of quotes from V’s friends, news reports, hymns, witnesses, lists, interviews and bits of history as Wrights attempts to recreate the atmosphere of the movement for the reader.

The narrative voice is that of V’s friend, someone quite close to her that has witnessed V’s struggles as well as her death. The book begins with the narrator’s account of V’s deathbed. “It smells like home. She said, dying. And I, What’s the you smell, V. And V, dying.”[sic] The reader learns very little about the narrator as she takes a journalistic role in the book. She was there, at V’s deathbed but the accounts of the incident are not directly from the narrator; They are from witnesses and from V herself, as well as newspapers and any other form of information Wright could gather. The narrator returns to V’s home after her death, it is here that we directly hear the narrator’s voice:

I park in a spot of shade and walk around.
Downtown half shut down.
Cotton gin still going, not strong, but going…
The house where my friend once lived, indefinitely empty…
If I put my face to the glass,
I can make out the ghost of her ironing board,
bottle of bourbon on the end.

Life Among the Savages

book by Shirley Jackson

annotation by Terri Spiers

Before the Mommy Blogger there was Shirley Jackson, the Mother of Horror

Life Among the Savages is s sweet mommy-memoir by Shirley Jackson, the same author who wrote a short story horror masterpiece that has terrified me since 6^th grade, “The Lottery.” As I read Life Among the Savages I couldn’t help but to wonder how her real life experience of raising kids in a small town informed her writing of a small town ritual of human sacrifice, as written in her famous short story. Even the title begs the question, who does she mean when she refers to the “savages?” The kids? The townspeople? The parents? And what kind of writer includes the word “savage” in a sweet mommy-memoir? But then again she titled her second nonfiction sweet mommy memoir “Raising Demons” so there you go.

The book is full of stories of how it is to raise children. The tender, the frustrating, the funny, and the futile. As one who likes to write about the chaos of my own children, I could easily relate to her setting. She opens by describing their house:

Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily a half million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks. (1)

Firebird: A Memoir

book by Mark Doty

annotation by Wendy M. Fontaine

Firebird by Mark Doty examines the roles that art and beauty play amidst lives characterized by sorrow and disappointment, while also telling the story of a young boy who grows up gay and finds his calling as a poet.

The book also takes a nontraditional approach to the many ways in which nonfiction writers manifest their perceptions of memory.

Doty opens Firebird with a metaphor that becomes the basic mosaic of the book: his comparison of memory – or remembering – to a Dutch perspective box he finds in a London museum. The box has two lenses, he tells us. Observers can look through one lens to see rooms with distorted contents, such as an elongated picture of a dog, or they can look through another lens, which shows a chain of rooms that appears to go on forever.

“Maybe around some corner, at some angle I’ll finally discover, if I lean into the eyepiece, if my eye works hard enough to probe the hidden recesses – I’ll find them…the family I can’t seem to see through any more direct means,” he writes. “They are hard to approach; they don’t want to be known. Memory confounds and veils them, and were they ever clear to begin with?”

Firebird takes an interesting approach to point of view and memory perception. It is told primarily in the present tense, leaving less room for reflection than memoirs written in the more traditional past tense. But to establish a stronger sense of hindsight, which is critical to the genre of memoir, Doty changes point of view from first person to third person in certain passages and uses phrases such as “that boy I was” to introduce reflection.

During his most painful memories, Doty switches from first to third person, referring to himself as “he” rather than “I.”

The switch from inside the author’s head to outside of his body, as though he were observing himself as a character in a movie or play, creates a greater narrative distance – not only between the writer and the reader but also between the writer and himself. If Doty is stepping back to see his boyhood self more clearly, he wants the reader to do so as well.

In one of the most intense passages of the book, Doty’s mother catches him dressed in drag as Judy Garland singing “Get Happy.”

“Am I wearing her lipstick?” he writes. “I feel blank; I have no explanations. She says, with a hiss, with shame and with exasperation, Son, you’re a boy. And they’re held frozen also in the son’s fear and shame, since of course he knows he’s a boy, doesn’t need reminding. The fact that she feels she must tell him this means he has failed: he isn’t who she wanted, he absolutely does not know how to be who she wanted.”