Writing with Rox WEEKLY—The best and worst Memoirs I read in the same week

I spend a lot of time looking for good memoirs. Aside form the micro-memoirs my students write week-after-week here at the Beach (which is likely why my standards are so high), I have a hard time finding anything I really like or have patience for. The same way I am increasingly intolerant of insipid produce that looks (and costs) like it should taste good, I am losing my patience for memoirs that promise but don't deliver. Now... I know what you're thinking... Or do I? Maybe you feel the same way. In any case,  there's no need to get me started on which memoirs and the myriad reasons I don't care for them, (but I'll bet you can guess which and why).


So here's how it happened: I came across two memoirs in the same week, the first of which I started at Too Cute's house and left behind (which says a lot about me since I never leave a good book behind), which he began reading and joked about not giving back. I must have been really desperate for a good memoir at the time (but what makes this day different than any others?) because I said, "no fucking way will you, bring it back! You can keep the Harpo Marx memoir, but bring this one back!" A travel memoir, I must have thought it had a good enough start, with a good enough premise, which it did now that I think of it. Sort of the way Eat, Pray, Love did, which was a much better book, but I still had issues with it. 

In the meantime the memoir I ordered on a whim from amazon, after googling "best (or maybe it was just "good" by then) memoirs 2013, 2014 + New Yorker + New York Times + Salon" showed up, so thankfully I could shoot up some fresh memoir while waiting for the stash I left at Too Cute's. 

I started House in the Sky, a travel memoir of an entirely different kind, that night and did not put it down for 4 days. One night I read 100 pages, unbeknownst to me until TCF woke up at 2 a.m. and said, "honey, are you still reading?" 

"Nope!" I said guiltily slamming the book shut, since I am always complaining to him that I don't get enough sleep. 

Well, the truth is, sleep didn't matter that week. Nothing did, in fact. Not my work, my kid, my boyfriend, yoga... nothing.  All that mattered was this alternative world where I was living alongside Amanda Lindhout and her boyfriend in Somalia in a dark, moldy, cockroachy room where we live because we have been kidnapped. Do I want to be in this world? Of course not. Is it disturbing and infuriating and deeply sad? Yes, it is. But we know how it ends. At least we think we do. But in the meantime, we are going to do whatever we can and survive whatever we have to in order go get free. 

So, why was this the best book I've read since Angela's Ashes, A General Theory of Love, and A New Earth? For one, it's well written, which means it takes it's time showing us every minute of her ordeal along with every person she encounters with such finite detail that you grow to love (or at least understand) all the players, the gravity of the political situation abroad, even when you don't want to. Because in each and every one of those characters and countries, we can't help but recognize a part of ourselves. 

Which is why we keep going until we get free.

There are other reasons I loved this memoir which I cannot put into words, which is why I am telling everyone to read it so I can understand. Part of me wonders if a trauma bond has been created between me and this book, much like the one created between between Amanda and her captors, much like that of anyone taken hostage is some form or another, and I have become overly dependent on my literary (albeit terrorizing) captor. We longed to be free, but couldn't bear it. 

Like a classic addict, instead of endure the let down and despair of ending the book—post-bookem depression—I immediately sought refuge in the first memoir, hoping it would ease the pain of being kicked out of the House in the Sky and back to the free world that I had to face. Sadly, once I returned to Nomad Woman, er... Female Nomad, I felt as though I'd been exiled to literary Siberia. Not that I have anything against females or nomads or any combination thereof; it's just that this book is one of the reasons (if not the reason) why memoirs get such a bad reputation about being a house of narcissism.  I realize anything I were to read following House in the Sky would fall short, but I would have settled for mediocre—anything to get me through the night. So please don't count on Female Nomad as your rebound memoir.

In the meantime, I begged Too Cute to read passages aloud and report to me frequently on exactly where he was in the book and what was happening so I could relive it over again. So I could temporarily go back, instead of grumbling about my booby prize memoir.

What does this memoir lack and why does it make me so mad? Especially since it's written by a famous children's author who abandoned her children to travel all over the world in order to write it? Honestly, it has a few good parts, good lands to get lost in, good people to meet. But the sad part is, I feel like I don't know any of them, let alone love them. And trust me: her characters are a lot more lovable than Amanda Lindhout's!

So there is my memoir cheer and jeer for the year. Oh dear! How queer, that I should rhyme in here! Steer clear!

Really, try not to be mad at me for speaking negatively about a memoir, when 99% of the time I say that everyone ought write her or his memoir if they are called to. And I do stand by that. In fact, I wish all of my students would hurry up and write their memoirs already so I can have something else good to read!

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Your favorite memoir? Least favorite memoir?

Writing with Rox WEEKLY—What rereading my Blog taught me (again) about writing and (again) about life

Occasionally I'll wonder if anyone reads my blog. Not in the "no one cares" sense, but in the "There are so many blogs out there, so many magazines and books...hasn't everyone read everything there is to read already and aren't I just repeating myself... and besides everyone's busy" sense. Everyone gets the point about writing by now, at least as far as what I have to say about it: Write your truth, don't edit, trust your raw voice, writing together is a wonderful way to build community, stories are gifts, etc etc...

Even so, writing is a lonely business and even though it's a deeply satisfying, beautifully puzzling, sometime life-changing, magical process of discovery, on the other side of the shore, when you set the pen down, it IS comforting to know that someone is out there reading, resonating, etc. 

It's the same kind of thing my students will sometimes say in discussing why we write in the first place.  "What's the point? Who cares? Who really wants to read this? It's boring! etc etc..."

"What are you, kidding?" I'll say after a disclaimer such as that, "this is brilliant! NOT boring. Keep going!" Sure, I tell them that and I mean it. I DO want to hear it. It is NOT boring. It is beautiful. And truthful. And please keep writing...  But you know how it is. You can't always apply these things to yourself, especially when you're the "teacher." 

It's the same kind of thing my students will sometimes say about it not sounding polished enough, poetic enough, story enough...to which I will say, "but it is, it is it is! It's perfect just the way it is. Write now, fiercely, truthfully, and edit later." I tell them that all too often when we edit as we go, or too soon, that we kill the soul of the piece. We flatten the rhythm, the joy, the fluid juicy energy that feeds us in every sentence; we kill the ecstasy we feel when writing it. The live raw pulsing song of the piece (poem, memoir, essay, short story) gets sacrificed in the name of the big game of "what others will think."

Then—and only then—are we left with boring writing. Clean writing, with less heart and more head. Writing that no longer breathes or sighs. Slaughtered innocent writing that we hardly recognize as our own. Voices abducted, fragments of sentences brutalized and bleeding on the literary field, lonely, without their original, less polished verb companions. I've seen it time and time again. In you, in me, in everyone.

How long have I been preaching on these things here at St Beach? A looong time. And sure, for the most part, I do take my own advice. I have faith in what I say, I walk the talk, write the fight.  But sometimes, like you and me and everyone, I can lose faith.  I can forget and wonder what it's all about. I question. What am I telling these innocent writer people? What do I know? Maybe it does have to sound "better." 

But faith is a good thing. Were it not for faith, I could have easily given over to the literary dark side, believing that pleasing the external is more important than honoring the internal, the truth, the deeper knowing that always surfaces when we honor our truth on the page. And we can feel that truth and pulse and recognize that truth immediately when we are writing. We know we are in it. 

Luckily, when my faith is tested on (and off) the page, I am struck by a reminding wind, a gust of cool calm reminding, seemingly out of the blue. Just a few months ago I was caught up in a panicked existential flare up of "what's the point? why bother? nobody cares, nobody listens."  I was having a very challenging week. All the hormones were aligned to make for some serious crazy. My fibro was in retrograde. I was in the mindset of seriously believing that if I called anyone with my shit that no one would care to listen because X or Y or Z has it a lot worse off than I do, and besides, they'd heard it all before in some earlier version, hadn't they? Plus, wasn't that what my boyfriend was for? My therapist? My community? The makeshift family that I opted for and chose for myself, likely before I was even born? Where were they now?

So there I was convinced nobody would listen or cared. I wasn't due to see my therapist for another week, Two Cute was mad at me about something, Paula was traveling somewhere, I didn't want to burden my friends or Jude's dad, etc, etc. So as I sat there in my own pity party, convinced how inconvenient my deepest oldest pain might sound—either too much to handle or too shallow to indulge—my thoughts ran throughout the day, "who will listen? Who will care? Is there anyone listening? Is there anyone I can talk to?" I believe I was in the middle of taking down the recycling, trying to keep up with the everyday doing of life though I didn't feel at all every day on the inside. I felt lost and alone. "Is there anyone? Anyone?"

And then, there it was, a faint little voice coming from deep within the right middle side of my body. "I'm listening," the voice said. "I'm right here. Right where I always am.  I'll listen."

Well, I just about had to sit down right there in the recycling. 

That was unexpected. I mean, I knew it, but I just never really heard it. Not like that. Not in my body. Which likely explains why at first I wanted to ignore it. I knew it was good old me coming through, but what do I have to do with this? Of course it's me listening; who else would it be? Aren't I always listening to me? Aren't I?

Or maybe I didn't recognize it as me at first. Maybe I did, but didn't take me seriously. Oh you? So, what of it? 

In any case, when I came upstairs I did sit down. It wasn't a big emotional thing. It was't another tearfest. It was just like, "oh, yeah. You are listening. You do count. You can listen and you can also hear." So I took the time to listen to me. To hear me. In my raw truth.

Of course as I knew then, as I deeply-er know now, I'm the only one who can give me that undivided love and listening that I sometimes fall into the trap of believing I need to get externally. I have to be the first one to listen, the first one to hear, listen, and care. That way if there ever does come a day when my people don't want to listen (yeah, right), don't care (yeah, right), judge me for my struggles (yeah, right), find me boring  (yeah, right), etc, I won't fall apart. I'm there. I'm listening. 

I'm reading my own damn blog.

You can imagine how this translates into writing. You are, as am I, first and foremost writing for yourself. To yourself, for yourself. When you come back and find yourself on the page years or days or months later, you will recognize yourself and be so grateful for the gift you have discovered on the page. Finding yourself again—again and again—in an earlier form, writing and breathing.


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What will you write "just for me"? 
Just for me, I write...