Tag: Memoir

LOVE’S WORK by Gillian Rose

The author wrote this memoir after her diagnosis with cancer at 46. She was dead by 48. It’s a highly compressed, painful read. She was a philospher, and you can tell. It’s not clear if this book is personal story or work of philosophy. Maybe all personal stories are works of philosphy, but not so clearly as this one. It’s remarkably dense:

“My journey to Auschwitz and east across Galicia to Belzec on the border of Ukraine did not affect me in the ways I had expected; it was the unexpected, rather, which provided the. nodes of enigma that compressed incompatible and uncomprehended meanings together.”

What?

Here is some rather beautiful lines from Swinburne. Let’s all think about death:

“From too much love of living,

From home and fear set free,

We thank with brief thanksgiving

Whatever gods may be

That no man lives for ever,

That dead men rise up never;

That even the weariest river

Winds somewhere safe to sea.”

A MOTHER’S RECKONING by Sue Klebold

Not sure how I got into this, but here is a memoir by the mother of one of the shooters at Columbine High School, Dylan Klebold. First thing to note, which really astonished me, was that school shootings were extremely uncommon at the time of Columbine. Imagine how bad it would be to find out that your son is a school shooter, without even having a model of what a ‘school shooter’ is.

This woman’s experience is truly jaw-dropping. Dylan, far from the bullied outcast I always thought he was (trenchcoat mafia etc), had in fact a bunch of friends and had been to the prom a few days before. He was also a perfectionist who was the child they ‘never had to worry about’. I guess I should not be surprised: teenagers lie to their parents. It is just astonishing how people do not know each other, even if they see each other every day.

What struck me particularly was that Dylan was not just a murderer, but also a suicide. When they eventually found his journals and went through them, it turns out he had been thinking of ending his life for at least two years. Even the week before the shooting he had been debating with his father on what dorm room to choose. Apparently this kind of apparent ‘planning’ is common in suicides – something for us to bear in mind when deciding how worried to be about someone. Her main takeaway after a decade of agonising is the simple one, that she wished she had listened more and talked less. Poor lady.

I cannot imagine how she survived this level of shock and bereavement. It puts one’s own problems very much into perspective i.e., they are minor.

STOP TIME by Frank Conroy

Do I really need another coming of age story from an American man?  Apparently so. I’ve enjoyed this one.  Mostly, it reminded me of how boring childhood used to be.  I know people talk about it a lot, but this memoir really brought back to me what it was like before phones and television. God, we were bored.  And I had my cousins and a library card, so I was not even as bored as this guy, who had neglectful parents and a shack in Florida. 

I am always awed/frightened by the idea of memoir.  Imagine sitting down and actually trying to recall your childhood?  It feels frighteningly impossible and also frighteningly possible.  This deep in some Pandora box territory.  I also really don’t like the idea of fixing the past into my specific narrative about it.  I think the past does best when it is constantly changing, just like the future.   That said, please enjoy this baller analysis of his step dad:

“Because for all his knocking around his view of the world was incredibly naïve.  He believed important jobs were handed out in nightclubs by impulsive millionaires and that he was the sort of man they might be given to.  Spoiled all his life . . . he deeply believed that the good things in life were given to one.  Food, clothing, and the bare necessities had to be earned, but after that it was a question of being in the right place at the right time, or knowing the right people or simply being lucky.  It never occurred to Jean to work hard anything except menial labour.  He was always above his work, the secret possessor of an inner wealth untouched by the world – his image of himself.” 

I came to this book from seeing that David Foster Wallace said it was the book that made him want to be a writer.  I just love author’s recommendations of other authors.  It’s sad this was only available in second-hand.     

NOBODY’S GIRL by Virginia Roberts Giuffre

I thought it was sad that I knew so much about Epstein but so little about his survivors. So I decided to read this memoir. I don’t know what I expected. I knew it was going to be bad, but it was really, really bad. This lady’s courage is just incredible.

It starts off terrible, with her being sexually abused by her father. I’m sorry to say she is seven. He then ‘shares’ her with his friend. Based on the similarity in the abuse, she thinks they were comparing notes. She attempts to run away, and is put in some kind of terrible ‘tough love’ type place. She runs away from there by hitch-hiking, and one of the men who picks her up rapes her at gunpoint. She manages to escape when he stops to answer his phone (!) and the very next person who offers her a ride turns out to be a trafficker. She is the only American underage girl he has, all the others are trafficked from Eastern Europe. By the time we get to Epstein, you fully understand how incapable she was of escape.

Epstein is particularly stomach-churning. He helpfully explains to her that he prefers it if girls ‘pretend to enjoy it’. He trafficks her to other men, one of whom leaves her bleeding from the mouth, vagina, and anus. He tells her ‘it’s going to be like that sometimes’. I don’t know why – it’s not so bad as the other stuff – but one detail that particularly stuck with me is that he often had her rubbing his feet for two hours straight during flights.

The book follows how she got away from him, and about how much energy it took for her to come forward. I had not realized the extent to which she really was the figurehead for getting this story out into the world. It had a huge cost on her, forcing her to relive the abuse many times.

It’s hard to read, and what makes it even sadder is that Virginia seems to understand how hard it is for us to read, and often takes breaks, flashing forward to her current happy life with her husband and three kids in Perth. I’m sorry to say that here it also gets worse. The book begins with a note from her co-author. Virginia had written to the co-author, emphasizing how important it was to her that the book be published, no matter what might happen to her. This sounds ominous, because it is. She unfortunately killed herself once she was sure the book was in its final draft. It turns out that her husband was allegedly violent towards her. I can kind of get that, just from reading the book. He does not seem a great guy (‘he said I could only take 3 of my 6 suitcases’ etc).

She sacrificed a lot to get her story out. She’s an amazing woman, and I am glad I got the opportunity to hear her story and learn from her.

ALL THE WORST HUMANS by Phil Elwood


Here is a memoir about working at the sketchiest end of what is already a sketchy industry, i.e, PR.  The author has spent a career shilling for dictators.  He was a big debater in high school, and it shows.  He thinks he is just so terribly clever.  The book was kind of interesting e.g., I learnt the horrifying fact that there are 300K publicists vs only 40K journalists in the US, and that a PR firm exists who took $18.8M from Saudia Arabia to try and spin the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.  But it was also kind of boring, because its just a litany of ways he tried to spin stuff that he thinks is very clever. I’m not sure they are that clever, I just think the list of people willing to do this stuff is not very long so the competition is not very steep. 

One part I did find interesting was the weekend he spent in Vegas trying to make sure that Gaddafi’s son, Muatsaem, did not do anything newsworthy.  It was wild to see how completely unhingedly entitled this guy was, down to beating hotel maids for trying to clean.  And how wildly unhappy.  I also enjoyed his visit to Nigeria, where he goes to try and massage the kidnapping of the Chibok girls.  Try this:

” “The whole world just found out where Nigeria is on a map because of these kidnappings,” I say.  “Everyone is watching you. You need to do something about this problem.”

“Problem?” an official asks.”

Everything about this is hilarious.  As if Nigeria was unknown to the world because this PR guy didn’t know about it.  And I just love the profoundly Nigerian reply, as if a few hundred more kidnappings is not that big deal, which, to be fair, it is not, in the larger scheme of the security situation in the North.  Also of interest to me was that he stayed in the Abuja Hilton, a place I have myself stayed for many months, and also noted the oil men, prostitutes, etc.  Strangely he was very stressed out by it.  I guess if you’ve never even heard of Nigeria before the Abuja Hilton is quite an introduction.

I also learnt something we should all recall, which is that in PR you should never state a negative. Apparently the first phrase that Americans think of when they think of Richard Nixon is ‘I am not a crook,’ which is something he said.  This is a classic example of accepting the wrong framing. You should always say ‘I am a good man,’ or ‘I love America’ and etc. 

One last thing, the writing is often sharp and funny.  He has a friend who is very Republican.  Here’s the friend explaining:

“Nobody who doesn’t have a generator and two years’ worth of food in their garage outflanks me on the right.”  Says the author: “I describe him as ‘authoritarian-curious’”

I love that phrase!  Perfectly describes these decadent rich people who don’t understand what democracy has given them.

THREE CAME HOME by Agnes Keith

This was a memoir about a woman and her toddler who spent three years in a Japanese prison camp in Borneo in WWII.  As you can imagine, it was not too good a time.

The part that really blew my mind was that everyone knew the Japanese were coming, and she had multiple opportunities to get out (e.g., the wonderfully poetic ‘last boat to Singapore’).  She declined because she did not want to leave her husband.  DAMN. 

She is extremely, extremely hungry, so much so that she has to avoid watching her son eat so she will not steal from him.  When she is finally freed, she is so malnourished her sight is affected, and she cannot read.  She only cries twice: once, when they are interned, and then once again, when the Australian army drop flyers on the camp to say that Japan has surrendered.  This was already rumoured, and so the Japanese prison guards had suddenly been treating them very well, including inviting them to a – get this – farwell banquet?!?  This reminded me of COLD CREMATORIUM, another story about someone who made it to the last day of the war in a camp, and lived to see the prison guards start to worry about consequences.

The reason they had already heard about the surrender was that the British soldiers had managed to create a radio.  It took them one month to make the radio, but three months to make the tools to make it. It is completely from scratch from various bits of waste metal, and one elderly civilian’s hearing aids.  GodDAMN people in the 1940s knew how to do things!  It ran on a hand cranked generator, and the strongest man was given extra food so he could crank it.

I think the most horrifying part was the section where the womens’ camp is moved on, and they believe the men, who are left behind, will be executed.   The wives and husbands are allowed to speak to each other across a ditch.  She thinks this is the last time she will ever see her husband.  When the Australians finally arrive, and she is given paper to write home, she writes this:

“We are all alive.  George thin, but well.  The day we have lived for has come at last.  There are no words to tell you what this means to us.  I have no words to say what I feel.  Peace and freedom at last. Thank god.”

Imagine the state you have to be in, that the first thing you right is, ‘We are all alive.”  It was the first news her family had had of her since the beginning of the war. 

AS I WALKED OUT ONE MIDSUMMER MORNING by Laurie Lee

Here is a classic memoir of being a young man.  It’s 1932, and Laurie sets out from his rural home to walk to London, bidding farwell to his (I assume exaggeratedly) elderly mother.  First he walks to Southampton, as he has never seen the sea.  Try this charming description of the seaside shops: “tatooists, ear-piercers, bump-readers, fortune-tellers, whelk-bars, and pudding boilers.”

Pudding boilers!  Then he goes to London, where he has some pretty intense country-mouse style experiences, and then he is on to Spain, where he walks many miles through extraordinarily rural communities, busking to pay his way.  He is a fantastic writer.  Here he is, entering an inn:

“The narrow stairs dripped with greasy mysterious oils and had a feverish rotten smell.  They seemed specially designed to lead the visitor to some act of depressed or despairing madness.  I climbed them with a mixture of obstinancy and dread, the Borracho wheezing behind me.  Half-way up, in a recess, another small pale child sat carving a potato into the shape of a doll, and as we approached she turned, gave us a quick look of panic, and bit off its little head. “

And I can’t go to a seafood restaurant without thinking about: “The dead eyes of fish, each one an ocean sealed and sunless.”

He writes the memoir as a much older man, and there is an elegiac quality to the whole thing. Here he is describing the sensation of his body on these long walks:

“. . seems to glide in warm air, about a foot off the ground, smoothly obeying its intuitions.  . . It was the peak of the curve of the body’s total extravagance, before the accounts start coming in.”

God, the accounts. 

I have thought often of this book since reading it.  There is something about the freedom of this walk, with no goal, no time limit, no agenda, that is really a challenge to my current life.  Also the safety of being a young man – imagine, just sleeping in a field, and not thinking you’ll be raped and murdered! Horrifyingly though, my main reflection was mostly about how he did all this without a phone.  Apparently he often just used to lie down in the heat of the day, and watch the ants, for hours.  Imagine doing all this without even a podcast!  Truly I need to get off my phone.

At the end he does what apparently everyone young did if they were in Spain in the 1930s, i.e., naively enter the civil war.  This part was dumb.

NAPLES ’44 by Norman Lewis

I feel like I spend half my time trying to dig up ideas of books to read. Someone gifted me a subscription to the London Review of Books, and it’s proving a goldmine of obscure ideas. This one is non-fiction, a journal of a British intelligence officer in Naples in 1944.

It’s a fascinating look at what it was like for civilians on the losing side. Guys, it was bad. Really bad. No one has anything to eat, to the point that a huge proportion of the female population is having to do sex work. It’s grim.

I don’t know who this author is, but the writing is banging. One small example – he casually describes a minor character has having “a face the colour of a newly unwrapped mummy.” Lol!

THE PLACES IN BETWEEN by Rory Stewart

In this unhinged memoir, Rory Stewart decides it is a good idea to walk across Afghanistan by himself. In 2002! In winter!

He has already been walking for many months by the time he gets to Afghanistan, and is constantly being told by warlords about how dangeorus the route is he has chosen, as it is across the mountains in the snow. You would think you would listen when TALIBAN WARLORDS are telling you something is dangerous. He does not. We learn a lot of things in this memoir, but not the answer to the most important question: why?

I did find it interesting when he said about how frequently locals sit in silence, especially if nothing interesting has happened of late, because as he notes they have all known each other since childhood, and none of them has read or seen anything interesting (because they can’t read and don’t have TVs). He is often with locals, because his plan for accommodation and food is to ask locals for them. I appreciate that due to the emphasis on hospitality in Islamic culture this is not such a very weird plan, but I personally would have been uncomfortable. The people he is walking among are very poor, and I don’t know if the fact that poor people are willing to give you their food means you should take it.

Also of interest is the fact that he is following in the footsteps of Babur, the 15th century founder of the Mongol empire, and he often refers to his memoir. It started to feel familiar to me, and then I realized this is because I have read it. It is, btw, one of the first memoirs even written. And I was like: DAMN, I am well read. Though I only remember the killing parts, to be honest.

OH THE GLORY OF IT ALL by Sean Wiley

In this memoir we see what happens when selfish people get divorced. The book is by the son, who was nine when his parents split up. His father was immensely wealthy, and did a good job of making sure his mother (third wife) got very little. She responded with high drama, asking Sean (the son) to DOUBLE SUICIDE WITH HER, and then GUILITING HIM when he didn’t. You would think his weeks with his father could only be better than this, but the new wife, the step-mother, is Snow White levels of bad. As a small example, at the dinner table, she has herself, the dad, and her kids sit at one end, and then leaves some chairs before Sean’s chair on his own. There are much more, and much harsher rules for him, and she tells Sean a lot about how his father doesn’t love him.

Predictably, Sean explodes as an adolescent. He is clearly a loving person, and this book is as much about the friends who get him through it, as the parents who are the ‘it’. The book in my view was a little long – we could have lost 100 pages without trouble – but I still enjoyed it, and admired the author rising above his childhood so magnificently.