100 Memoirs

You don’t have to be a seer to recognize material for political celebrity memoir these days.  Everyone knew that Sarah Palin would ink a book deal (even though she would not ink the memoir herself).  Sure enough, HarperCollins signed her.

The August  issue of Vanity Fair includes an in-depth portrait of Palin by Todd S. Purdum–published just before her surprise announcement yesterday that she is leaving the governorship. You can read about the upcoming memoir in the context of a good summary of her entire career by following the link above.

The instant political celebrity memoir from the 2008 campaign has developed a track record. Samuel Wurzelbacher (remember him?) earlier this year published his memoir called Joe the Plumber: Fighting for the American Dream. Click on the image to read some of the reviews (2.5 stars). And read this Washington Post description of one stop on the book tour–11 people in the audience. Book sales: 5.

Twitter was alive with conjectures about Palin’s HarperCollins memoir after the resignation announcement yesterday. Some thought she has already had her 15 minutes of fame and will no longer have the star power necessary to sell books.

The publisher, gamely, predicted interest in the memoir to be “huge.” See GalleyCat post at mediabistro.com.

What are your thoughts–either about Sarah Palin herself or about her prospects to remake her career and her life by telling her story (ghost writer at her side)?

Oddly enough, as a child I was enchanted by Grandma Moses.  I loved the fact that she made art out of many of the same experiences I was having growing up on a farm–gardening, sledding, planting, and harvesting.

When she died in 1960, I was 12. But when she was born, Abraham Lincoln had not yet taken office! I learned that she started painting at the age of 76. The lesson I took from that is that old age does not have to be a time of decline.  It just might become the most creative, exciting time of one’s life. Even as a young person, I found that prospect exciting.

Many memoirs take the reader back to childhood.  One of my favorites, Little Heathens, was written by Mildred Armstrong Kalish (reviewed here) when she was in her 80’s. Looking backward seems to come naturally after a certain age.

But Diana Athill, author of Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir chose to go the other direction in this book. She explains her reason for writing about old age this way, “Book after book has been written about being young, and even more of them about the elaborate and testing experiences that cluster around procreation, but there is not much on record about falling away.”

Born in 1917, Diana Athill, educated at Oxford, served other writers as an editor before she became a writer herself. As editor of Jean Rhys, Philip Roth, Simone de Beauvoir. V.S. Naipaul and many other greats, she participated in literary life vicariously until she began to write short stories and then memoir.  The current book is her sixth and most popular one and won the Costa Award for biography. Recently the Queen of England appointed her an Officer in the British Empire. You can read a delightful interview by Kira Cochrane in The Guardian here.

The book itself consists of 16 short chapters, cascading toward the end, just as the life of the author does the same.  The falling away metaphor fits the central image of the tree fern a plant purchased by Athill even though she will never see it grow into a tree.  She enjoys the fern stage and notes, “This little nub is the start of a new frond, which grows very slowly to begin with but faster towards the end–so much faster that you can almost see it moving.”

Life starts out slow and finishes fast.  Or so I have been told.  My own experience as I round the corner on my 60th year, already confirms this: time is speeding up.

Athill’s metaphor of falling deepens every carefully crafted chapter. Whether she is talking about former lovers, caretaking, make-up, or the act of writing itself, she directs a steady gaze at the realities of aging and death–as well as joys still possible. She says no book on aging can end with a bang, but hers does not end with a whimper, either.  She ends by affirming the desire to live. The fact that she wrote the book at age 89 and published it the year the Queen appointed her an Officer, makes her readers want to live as long and as well!

The CBC Canada Reads Book Club picked these ten memoirs as their top ten:

1. The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls
2. A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
3. Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope by Shirin Ebadi
4. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
5. Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs
6. The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
7. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
9. Night by Elie Weisel
10. Nothing to be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

If you want to know why, watch the video here

It’s hard to put together a top ten memoirs list! But Sally Rogers, the grand prize winner of the beautiful sentences contest, did it, and, again, she is the contest winner! She will receive another memoir in the mail. Congrats, Sally.

Since Sally seems to love spiritual memoir with an English background, I selected the prototype for The Vicar of Dibley TV show–Joy Carroll Wallis’ The Woman Behind the Collar– as her prize:

Below are all the suggestions I received, starting with Sally’s:

Just published – “Resurrection with Cane and Shoe” by Harut Barsamian, the story of a handicapped child who repatriates with his family to Soviet Armenia, bears the brunt of the Soviet Regime, immigrates to the USA in 1966, practically penniless, reaches the heights of Corporate America in record time, wins numerous honors including a Life Fellow of IEEE. He is now a Professor at University of Irvine, California.

“The Immigrants’ Daughter,” is (Mary Terzian) my story, growing up in Egypt, during World War II, in a community of Armenian immigrants traumatized by genocide. Attendance at an English high school inspires me enough to stand up to old-fashioned oppressive parents, to leave home (unheard of in the Middle East), work with the United Nations in different countries and settle in the United States. The book won Best Books 2006 Award and placed finalist in Indie Excellence 2007 Book Awards.

Isn’t it exciting to have the author herself participate? I encourage you to go to Amazon and check out the book here. Five stars from 13 reviewers is excellent!

Finally, Chin Oh  not only offered two good books but her insightful descriptions of why she is attracted to them!

1. “The Last Lecture” by late Dr. Randy Pausch. This one touched me to the core about the shortness of the life we live in. It’s a memoir about a brilliant computer science prof for his your children about his life, fulfilling his childhood dreams, his love for his family, and his journey fighting for more pancreatic cancer research.

2. “Always Looking Up – The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist” by Michael J. Fox. I’m still reading it. The first chapter caught my attention as Michael explains (in detail) what a Parkinson’s patient go through each day. I love how simply this memoir was written yet powerful in its delivery from the author.

How about the rest of you? No need to come up with ten. How about one or two you would offer to a friend for his or her summer reading list?

I have not forgotten my promise to provide my own top ten list. But, like I said, it’s harder than I thought to do this!  Seeing other lists is a big help.  Criteria help, also.  I may need to think more about this. What criteria do you think I should use?

Let me begin with an apology for slacking off on blogging this past week. I probably will continue a low profile until June 30th, after an important board meeting, and after I have finished a book review to send to Christian Century.

But how lovely it would be if we together could make some progress toward the ultimate book list we want to construct here–a list that amounts to the top 100 memoirs in our collective opinions.

You could be enormously helpful by submitting names of memoirs you love and why you love them. They can be classic or contemporary. If you can come up with five or ten names, that would even be better. To get you started, here’s one list of 40 already published online.

But this short video and blog entry from CBC are even better. Watch/read it, and you will see both some great suggestions and outstanding memoir short reviews–and a methodology I would like to copy.  The CBC Top Ten List was created by readers and viewers, not by any one single “expert.”

What is your favorite memoir? Why? Do you have a top ten or top five list to share? While I write my review, you can be reviewing your own bookselves and memories.

Prize alert! I will give away another memoir from my shelf–this time I will  judge instead of asking for votes.  Criteria? The most complete and insightful list.

Summertime and the leaves are green and the sky is blue! It’s the season of childhood and freedom. I remember summers long ago–bare feet, walks in the creek, kick the can and hide-and-go-seek.  And all the fresh fruit and vegetables straight from the garden or the market.

In the summer life is one big bowl of cherries.

If Life is a bowl, then the cherries themselves are the sweet stories cool enough to sweat on a summer day. Cherries are stories that explode inside your mouth, that sustain you in the heat, that build up cravings for the next one. We cherish stories because they turn sunlight and shadow, heat and rain, into food for body and soul.

That’s all I have to say today. Off to eat another cherry and read another story! Here’s to the most succulent of fruits and books in your life.

What’s on your summer reading list?  Any great memoirs? What plump cherries can you share with us? Summertime memories?

Time for a little history report. My first blog post ever was written for the Fetzer Institute Campaign for Love and Forgiveness website. The subject was the week-long volunteer opportunity I was given to help with Katrina recovery in New Orleans. March 24-April, 3 blog posts appeared, and USA Today published my op-ed article about the experience on March 20, 2008.  June 1, 2008, wrote my first blog post on the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference website, where I learned to upload photos and place links into posts. I wrote 62 posts there and made some writer/blogger friends who are still reading and writing with me.

Blogging in the red chair.

July 30, 2008, was my 60th birthday, and my son Anthony gave me the wonderful gift of setting up this website. On August 9, 2008, I wrote my first post on 100Memoirs.com. Today, ten months later, I am posting #100.  Beginning in January I began to be active on fb, which has broadened the readership of this blog.  Maybe Twitter will do the same if I can get to the next step of where to do my updates, how to make tiny URLs, and all the other little tricks of the trade.

I have not reviewed 100 memoirs yet, partly because the readers seem to enjoy a different mix of reviews, commentary, and mini-memoir. Following the advice of readers from the last post, however, I will try to start a list on the home page, building to 100 memoirs eventually.

I would never have imagined how much fun blogging would be. Thank you, readers, for your comments, critiques,  and words of encouragement. I thrive on them!

Embarrassing story:  When I was a newbie grad student at the University of Texas at Austin, I turned in a review of a book that my professor did not recognize.  He asked me why I chose this book to review.  I responded, “Because it was on my shelf.” He looked horrified.

As Paul Newman might say, “This was a failure to communicate.” I thought I was bringing the value of simplicity and economy to the process.  My professor saw only shoddy thinking or academic sloth.

I named this blog 100 memoirs because of the advice given by Heather Sellers in Chapter by Chapter to read 100 books in the genre you aspire to. I have several thousand books in my basement library, collected over many years of being an English professor and avid reader.  I knew I had read 50-100 autobiographies and biographies. But I began buying new ones.  My future daughter-in-law works in the publishing industry, so new memoir began pouring in. Thanks, Chelsea!

So the question now is.  Which ones are best?  If reading forms the mind, and if reading takes precious time, then surely one wants to read the best 100 memoirs and not just 100 memoirs!?

When a form becomes popular enough long enough, a canon emerges. That may be happening in the memoir genre right now.  Perhaps you and I can contribute to that process by defining what we admire most and selecting memoirs that fit those criteria.  Or, we could flip the process by naming the books and then describing what makes them great. More and more courses are being taught about autobiography and memoir. Professors are creating reading lists and these eventually become the canon.

The beautiful sentences contest taught me that asking for the best without describing the criteria can produce frustration.  So let’s start with criteria.

I will throw out one criterion and give an example. Then I hope you will follow with your own examples or another criterion.

Criterion:  Authentic voice.  Agents and publishers love this word. And I do too. Voice on the surface looks like personality.  For example, Julia Childs’ memoir of her years in Paris and America as she built her career sounds just like her distinctive voice on the air–a little breathless and patrician without sounding pedantic.

Haven Kimmel’s voice in her breakthrough memoir Zippy is down home and mystical and amused (therefore amusing).

Classic memoirs earn their status in part because of the unique voice of the author. Hemingway’s Moveable Feast, for example, takes you far, fast. You move with him through the quotidian details of the day with energy.  When he is hungry, his readers are also. He gets you to the destination rapidly, but your senses are more alive than if you had lingered for hours on the path.

Natalie Goldberg’s newest book on memoir contains a list of her favorite memoirs at the end.  Some Amazon reviewers have made lists of their best ones.  I would like to create my own here. But I need your help. I may also need Anthony’s help with the technology.  I think I need a list on the home page of this website. That way, readers can see it emerge.  There are books I reviewed in the blog that I would not put on the list of 100 best. And there are many on other people’s lists that I have not yet read.  There are also lots of books I have read but not reviewed.

Are such lists helpful to you? Would you like to see a list on the home page?

Is authentic voice a useful criterion for selecting high quality memoir?

What one memoir (or other book)  stands out for you because of the voice of the author?

The poet Keats, at the age of twenty-four,  penned these immortal words,

I thought of them often as readers and I struggled with how to evaluate the many different kinds of sentences entered into the contest to find the most beautiful one.

Of the 158 people who read the sentences, 11 entered the contest, and six voted.  One person, Sally Rogers, received two votes (one from Gutsy Writer Sonia Marsh and one from Marilyn Stein Lefeber, both bloggers) for the quote she entered. Congratulations, Sally, you are our grand prize winner!  Here’s the sentence:

“An original life is unexplored territory. You don’t get there by taking a taxi — you get there by carrying a canoe.” — Alan Alda

I took this quote to my memoir bookcase this morning, and enjoyed pondering which book to give Sally. I finally selected The Irrational Season by Madeleine L’Engle, a woman who carried her own canoe!  Before sending the book to Sally, I will return to some of the places I underlined.  Here’s a plucked sentence for you:  “Like the White Queen, I find it a good discipline to practice believing as many as seven impossible things before breakfast.”

Picking a book turned out to be so much fun, that I found one for all the people whose sentences attracted a voter.  Here, for example, is one for Wayne Ramsey, who offered so many wonderful sentences along with his reveries about them.  Karin Larson Krisetya, from Indonesia, picked the Yeats line,

“WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep”

I searched for a book about an abiding romance, one of the least frequently told stories in literature! It seems young love seldom lasts into old age or at least is seldom celebrated by the poets.  Yeats himself only yearned for this fate.  He did not experience it.  Julia Childs, however, apparently did. In My Life in France, her memoir of how she fell in love with her husband Paul, the country of France, and French cooking, Childs illustrates the value of a strong appetite–for food, for a place, and for the love of one’s life. Notice the two hearts on the cover.  Here’s the final beautiful sentence, which has Julia’s huge personality written all over it: “And thinking back on it [an unforgetable meal in 1948] now reminds me that the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite–toujours bon appetit!”

Speaking of the pleasures of the table. . .my dear neighbor Chin Pheng Oh offered her own thought: “Stand on the table once in awhile and open your eyes to a different view and perspective. Nothing is what it seems at first glance.” Betty Wiens, a blogger from Paraguay, voted for this sentence.  She knows it is true.

Chin has lived in two cultures, so she has stood on the table often.  I found this book just for her:  American Chica:  Two Worlds, One Childhood by Marie Arana. I have not read this book myself, but since Chin is my neighbor, I can always borrow it.

Kevin Kilmer, AKA Amish Guitar, gave us both a luscious sentence from Haven Kimmel and a lovely rant about not being able to vote in a contest without criteria.  For this sentence and for the rant he is awarded a prize also:  “The distance between Mooreland in 1965 and a city like San Francisco in 1965 is roughly equivalent to the distance starlight must travel before we look up casually from a cornfield and see it.” From A Girl Named Zippy, a delightful memoir I have not yet reviewed here.

I will be sending Kevin The Solace of Leaving Early, another book I have not read.  Let’s hope Kevin finds many beautiful sentences within its pages. Connie L. nominated this sentence because of its clarity, striking comparison, and the suggestion of mystery.

Finally, we have Bruce Hostetler, who picked a line from Dr. Suess,

“But tonight they’ve forgotten their feet are so sore
and that’s what the wonderful night time is for.”

Ila Stoltzfus, mother of Nik and therefore my daughter Kate’s future mother-in-law, selected this sentence.  Could it be that planning for a wedding brings back a lot of childhood memories?  For me, shopping for a wedding dress for a daughter or future daughter-in-law brings back memories of watching a child wobble away on a bike for the first time. Beauty and evanescence walk hand in hand into the night.

I thought of going down to the basement and pulling out a Dr. Suess book, but I am saving them in case I become a grandma some day.  Instead, I found the incredible story called House of Happy Endings by Leslie Garis. Do you know how Uncle Wiggly, The Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift stories were written? By ghost writers cranking out formula fiction that profited a franchise. Leslie Garis tells the tragic story of how her grandfather’s role in this literary production of happy endings for a mass audience led to sad endings for many others, especially her father.

I will need addresses from Sally, Kevin, and Bruce.  You can write to me at shirley.showalter@gmail.com

Enjoy the books.  Thanks for playing the game.  I hope we all think more deeply about the beautiful sentences all around us.

In the words of Julia Childs–tourjours bon appetit!

During the last month Iran has consistently shown up on the top of the list of readers of this blog outside the U.S.  I am curious about the 13-20 readers who evidently come here regularly.  To my knowledge I have no close friends  living in Iran.  I would love to hear from some readers in Iran!

I have had the great honor of meeting Shirin Ebadi several times because of my work at the Fetzer Institute.   I notice she has written this memoir.  Shall I read and review it?

Iranian readers, please comment.  How did you find this blog?  Do memoirs sell well in Iran?  Do you have a story you are writing about your own life?

Well, what fun it has been to see the contest entries emerge in the last week. Eleven readers responded, some with one sentence, and some with several.  I had great plans to find a polling widget and install it on this site to make tracking easier, but I think the numbers are small enough that we can keep track of the votes through the comments section both here and in FaceBook.  I will try. Each contestant has been given a number and a name or nickname.  Please vote for the number, name, and (in the case of multiple entries) the sentence you like best.  It would be wonderful if you include your reasons.  Winners will be announced on June 4.  Have fun. At least one of these contestants will win a hand-picked memoir from my bookshelf.  Who shall it be?

1.amishguitar

The distance between Mooreland in 1965 and a city like San Francisco in 1965 is roughly equivalent to the distance starlight must travel before we look up casually from a cornfield and see it. –Haven Kimmel in A girl named Zippy

2.Christee

You promised me gloves from the skins of the fishes
The smile of the dolphin for a ring in my hands

From the song, “You Brought Me Up.” Words by Louis De Paor. I know the song from a CD by Karan Casey, who used to sing with the Irish group Solas.

3.MCME
“There were ten thousand, thousand fruit to touch, / cherish in hand, and not let fall.” — Robert Frost, from “After Apple Picking”

And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. — T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. — Psalm 139

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
– Shakespeare, sonnet 29

4.Wayne Ramsey
Coleridge’s “As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.”

A.E. Housman,

“LOVELIEST of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.”

Shakespeare

“I WONDER by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved ?”

Shakespeare
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.”

Yeats
“WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep

And older still, maybe we all begin to think in terms of gratitude and appreciation for being alive, for the blessings of life and the divine presence in life”

–A. Einstein

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

ee cummings
i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
Meister Eckhart

“The gloom of the world is but a shadow,
behind it, yet within reach, is joy.
There is a radiance and glory in the darkness, could we but see,
and to see, we only have to look. I beseech you to look.”

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” -

Still, the most beautiful, intelligent and spiritual line I know may be from that great spiritual teacher Yogi Berra, who said:
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
5.Adam

Two from G. M. Hopkins:
…Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah ! bright wings.
—-from “God’s Grandeur”

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise him.
—-from Pied Beauty

6.Bruce Hostetler

“But tonight they’ve forgotten their feet are so sore
and that’s what the wonderful night time is for.”

- Dr. Seuss (from The Sleep Book)

7.Mariposa

“It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.” -G. K. Chesterton in “Orthodoxy”

8.srogers

“You can’t test courage cautiously” — Annie Dillard

“An original life is unexplored territory. You don’t get there by taking a taxi — you get there by carrying a canoe.” — Alan Alda

9.Elaine Sayre

The most beautiful sentence…I love you.
The second most beautiful sentence…I forgive you.

10.Betty

Happiness is real only when shared.

11. Chin Pheng Oh

“Stand on the table once in awhile and open your eyes to a different view and perspective. Nothing is what it seems at first glance.”