Review by Lanie Tankard.

In Lunch Bucket Paradise, Fred Setterberg sketches “the dawn of promises that maybe promised too much.” His portrait of an era covers the time from the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to the Vietnam War draft, with a geographic concentration on California and Oregon. He tosses in a touch of the Solomon Islands for good measure.

The reader follows the masculine voice of the story as he parses his father’s life, contrasts it with his uncle’s, and then tries to figure out his own. His mother makes appearances, but the majority of the story is told via the major figure’s childhood memories and depictions of the two males prominent in his upbringing.

Chapters alternate between escapades and experiences, with an occasional section musing about topics such as the rise of suburbia, America as the land of plenty, and tuberculosis. We catch glimpses of times past through the sprinkling of brand names (Betty Crocker, Jell-O, Dream Fluff, Rambler, Ronson, Scott’s Turf Builder), TV shows (Steve Allen), and songs (Archie Bell and the Drells, James Brown, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels).

I’ve never been a teenage boy, but readers who have will likely relate to depictions of sexual yearnings. (I did relate to the mention of Snake Stabler, with whom I went to high school. Roar Lions!)

Paternal wisdom is passed down from father to son: “General maintenance…is one of the secrets of life.” “You got to learn everything you can or otherwise you’re just going to be a prisoner, like we were.” “There’s just not a lot of room for mistakes.” “Work hard…stay lucky.”

These precepts bombard the growing youngster alongside aphorisms spouted by his peers: “…where did working ever get anybody?” “Do it one day, and then you just got to get up and do it all over again.” “Nobody likes what they do.”

By the end, the boy has evolved into a young man ready to widen the city limits of the town he has known, poised at the abyss of the world yawning wide open before him — yet afraid of its promises.

And right there is the crux of my dilemma as a reader: I, too, am afraid — of the book’s promises in its subtitle. Is A True-Life Novel true? Is it a novel? Or is it memoir? Is it truth or fiction? Are the photographs from the author’s actual life, or an invented one? Have I read a nonfiction fiction? Faction? Autobiography? Docufiction? Mockumentary? Verisimilitude? Is it literary journalism? Journalistic literature? I find myself scratching my head in confusion.

I’ve pondered this topic before in book reviews: Half-Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel by Jeannette Walls,  The Mother Who Stayed: Stories by Laura Furman, and Freedom by Jonathon Franzen.

Walls explained her use of the term true-life novel to readers in an Author’s Note: “I wrote the story in the first person because I wanted to capture [my grandmother’s] distinctive voice, which I clearly recall. At the time, I didn’t think of the book as fiction…. I saw the book more in the vein of an oral history, a retelling of stories handed down by my family through the years, and undertaken with the storyteller’s traditional liberties.”

Furman created fiction from diaries written by another woman who lived in the 1800s, and clearly detailed this on the copyright page: “This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

Franzen stated in his Ten Rules for Writing Fiction: “The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention.”

How does that occur? Novelist Amy Waldman speculates: “Here is a paradox of fiction-writing. You are crafting something from nothing, which means, in one sense, that none of it is true. Yet in the writing, and perhaps in the reading, some of a character’s actions or lines are truer than others.”

So just what is it that Setterberg has crafted in Lunch Bucket Paradise? It’s not Capote, Doctorow, Didion, or Eggers.

I opened my yellowed copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, touted on the cover as “Sketches of the Author’s Life in Paris in the Twenties.” I bought this paperback in 1971 at the Hemingway Museum in Key West. In the preface, written eleven years earlier in Cuba, Hemingway commented: “If the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as fiction. But there is always the chance that such a book of fiction may throw some light on what has been written as fact.” He counseled himself on page 12: “Write the truest sentence that you know.”

I’d feel less toyed with as a reader if Setterberg had clarified what he was doing in the book itself. Instead, I had to Google around to find out. He parsed his method in a recent interview, saying he started out writing a memoir. “Then I said, ‘I’m going to write, and every time the impulse hits me to lie, I’m going to give myself license to do it and see what happens.’”

Hmmm, okay, so here we have two polar opposite approaches — one using truth as a guiding principle and one using lying. I’m curious about how, assuming the ultimate goals are similar, the end products will differ. Is “Sketches of the Author’s Life” a more accurate summation, perhaps conveying the impressionistic method used by Hemingway’s artist contemporaries? Is “A True-Life Novel” truly a subtitle, or is it a disclaimer? Oh, if only James Frey had thought to slap it on the cover of  A Million Little Pieces.

Later, in an online essay on Talking Writing: A Magazine for Writers, Setterberg said he switched from memoir to fiction/lying because he wondered, “Did anybody need to hear about my childhood chemistry set”? Well, frankly, if it’s well written from the heart, I’d like to read about his experiments. Search Amazon on “chemistry sets for kids” under Toys and Games, and you’ll find 108 sets for sale, with 7,043 reviews posted. Obviously they’re still popular.

There’s a certain amount of trust on the part of the reader to allow an author to take liberties with literary license, if a work is well written. And there are individual chapters of Setterberg’s book that hold eloquence within them. His description of his father’s workbench, for example, moved me to tears, for I felt as though Setterberg had been standing in front of my own father’s workbench when he wrote it: “I liked the way the nails and bolts and washers rattled around in their ancient mayonnaise jars as I plucked them down from the wall of cabinet shelves—each container segregated by size and purpose, labeled with an ink-pen scrawl across a strip of tan masking tape.” Did all Dads do that in the Fifties? Mine sure did.

Setterberg’s digression on family photographs is thought provoking: “What do we seize and memorialize?”

His best chapter, perhaps, is the seventh, “Labor Day,” detailing work in a ketchup factory. The house fire thread, however, is dropped for way too long, IMHO, and never fully elaborated.

The copyright page notes: “Several chapters of this book have appeared in serial form….” Some of them won prizes and awards. Yet do they cohere when placed side by side? It’s hard to follow the timeline. And that approach can cause abrupt segues. There is no context, for example, when the protagonist of Lunch Bucket Paradise suddenly appears as a band member in Chapter Six, “Jungle Music.”

The book is a nice recap of a certain period of history in this country. Setterberg offers a look at the seeds of divergent views on the Vietnam War draft. As a reader, though, I felt abandoned at the end. I wanted to know whether the protagonist resisted the draft — and whether Phil survived Vietnam.

In a lengthy look at “The Rise of True Fiction” in Columbia Journalism Review, Alissa Quart termed it a mashup genre and indicated it’s here to stay. So we the readers probably need to try to understand it. On a creativity palette, it can be a useful hue.

Still, some small part of me wonders why true life itself is not sufficient.

###

Lanie Tankard

Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

By Richard Potter

Chinaberry Sidewalks is my first direct exposure to a great American writer, Rodney Crowell. A songwriter first and foremost, with Chinaberry Sidewalks Crowell proves to be a gifted memoirist as well.

As I prepared to write this review, it became clear that my indirect exposure to Mr. Crowell reaches back more than thirty years. He wrote one of my all-time favorite songs, “Ashes By Now”, which was covered by Emmylou Harris in 1981 and again by Lee Ann Womack in 2000. Crowell’s name appears as producer and composer on several of my treasured vinyl LPs, including Harris’s Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town (1978), and Rosanne Cash’s Somewhere in the Stars (1982). (Crowell and Cash were married from 1979-1992.)

More recently, my favorite memoirist Mary Karr posted a video of Crowell and herselfin the act of co-writing lyrics for an upcoming album. In a 2010 interview with Crowell, Karr asks, “What possessed you to go from being a Grammy-winner to being an actual literary memoirist?” Crowell explains that he did not want to limit his creativity to music, especially as he grew older. “I wanted to learn to paint on a different canvas so I would never stop working as an artist.”

At first, Crowell found he was “drunk” on how many words he could use, and it took some time to be weaned from the “trickery” he had come to rely on to write songs. Chinaberry Sidewalks demonstrates that Crowell can easily stomach the solid food of sentences and paragraphs, and that his gift of storytelling crosses easily from music to memoir. His account of cracking himself over the head with an empty pop bottle displays a clever sense of humor: “I got the full cartoon effect. It felt as if I’d split my skull into two pieces. I saw stars. Drunken birds tweeted, chirped, and crash-landed on the seat next to me. Guardian angels swooped down for a closer look, winced, and sped off in search of scraped knees or bumblebee stings.”

Crowell can just as easily make you cry. Chinaberry Sidewalks is a series of vignettes drawn from his memories of growing up poor in east Texas, the only child of an alcoholic father and a Bible-thumping mother. The book opens through the eyes of a five-year-old eavesdropping on his parents’ 1955 New Year’s Eve Party. Disgusted by the drunken behavior, young Rodney accidently-on-purpose fires a .22 caliber bullet into the linoleum floor. He braces himself for the worst as his father grabs the gun. “Instead, he hugged me so close to his heart that even through the ringing in my ears I could hear it pounding. Being squeezed so hard gave me a feeling of comfort. My peacekeeping mission was complete. There would be no fighting that night.” Although there are many “knock-down drag-outs” to come, it is clear that Crowell truly loved and respected his mom and dad. In his interview with Mary Karr he describes Chinaberry Sidewalks as their “triumphant love story…cloaked in the strangest housecoat you’ve ever seen.”

Despite the abuse he witnessed and suffered — physical, mental, and emotional — Crowell responds with humility, strength, and courage. He recognizes his parents as fallible human beings who made mistakes, but loved him nonetheless. At his father’s deathbed Crowell lifts the curtain on his own inner battles: “His condition seemed to mirror every ounce of self-loathing I’d managed to accrue in thirty-eight years of living, and an overwhelming desire to kill him screamed through every pore in my body.” Horrified at the thought of harming a dying man, he asks then-wife Rosanne Cash if she could understand his feelings. “He’s just burning off the past, Rodney,” she says quietly.

From cover to cover, relationships take center stage. Two full chapters are devoted to the bond between Crowell and his childhood friend, Dabbo. Crowell appears to bring the friendship to a close at the end of Part Two: “My partnership with Dabbo dissolved completely when I encountered the awkwardness of junior high and a whole new set of social concerns. Despite our best efforts, the two-year age difference between us became a chasm we simply couldn’t cross.” But then Dabbo abruptly reappears less than two pages into Part Three. This is about the only place where the memoir misfires, and it demonstrates how difficult it can be to cross-pollinate a series of vignettes with the chronology in which they occurred. Fortunately it is a minor disruption, and easily excused as Crowell weaves his stories into a warm, comfortable blanket of love and forgiveness.

On the back of the dust cover, fellow songwriter Kris Kristofferson states that Chinaberry Sidewalks is “so well written I had to immediately reread it to see if it was as good as I thought it was. It is.” I wholeheartedly agree, and hope Mr. Crowell won’t make us wait too long for Volume II of his gifted storytelling.

Do you think a songwriter has an advantage in learning the art of story telling?

Do you like to read about “crazy” families? How do such memoirs impact your view of your own childhood, your own family? Leave a comment please.

Richard M. Potter is a freelance writer, musician, and consultant to nonprofits. He blogs at www.richardmpotter.com, jams at www.shoalcreek.org, and loves his wife and two teen-aged children at home in Kansas City, Missouri.

Shirley's Memoir

Welcome today to Shirley Kurtz, another memoirist and Mennonite. Shirley and I graduated from Eastern Mennonite College (now university) and both of us have used our English majors as writers all our lives. Shirley, however, began writing books long ago and has published one memoir, several children’s books, and now a novel. I asked her to reflect on memoir v. fiction. She chose to do so by offering samples (in italics below) from her memoir, Growing Up Plain, and her new novel, Sticking Points.

Shirley's Novel

Plain and True

by Shirley Kurtz

I stumbled upon Cynthia Rylant’s book at the public library, But I’ll Be Back Again, its jacket in bold pink, purple, yellow. I can do that, I thought. Say which boys, divulge the pathetic love life. Though my daddy’d never left us, hadn’t I known misery? Hasn’t every child? I pawed through my parents’ box of old photographs and found enough to go on, to drive my plot. Writing for young readers, upon these pictures I would hang my past.

Right here was proof. I wasn’t about to try for a genealogy bogged, exhaustive history. Just, people didn’t know certain insider details about plain-dressing religious sects. Folks deserved better—these persons whose idea of “Mennonite” was a Hollywood starlet with bangs sticking out of her prayer cap. Writing Growing Up Plain I wanted to set the record straight. “Plain” could be lots more severe than what you saw in movies. It could exhibit to the nth degree.

Still—and this was just as important—ways could be found to circumvent the strictures. This conniving involved agony and tedium and maybe even spiritual warfare.

I must have had at least as many waves in my hair as Jeanne Wert and the others. In the nighttime I’d set my waves with bobby pins and then put a hair net over top, to control the frizz. Also, for a while we all thought it stylish to wear our hair pulled tight back over our ears. I got sores behind my ears from them being jammed against my glasses.

Extra nuggets—poor constipated Mary H., Rita Zerbe’s short shorts, my Kool-Aid flood—came in useful, helped me firm up the picture. That’s a tricky part—convoluting the narrative just enough to roil it, not muddy things. And I knew I mustn’t skewer my family and friends. Not only would that have been low-down, I also would’ve been skewering myself. So kindness required a measure of guile, of magical thinking. I labored to speak truthfully.

Due to my obsessive-compulsive streak, this matter of honesty has always felt like a sorely inconvenient blister of obligation. Maybe others view their dexterity with words as a gift, even a right to be indulged, but I’m not that lucky. Younger, when freelancing articles for Mennonite church magazines, I seemed constitutionally incapable of producing the godly, uplifting personal-experience type material editors went for, and being phobic about relating accurately the quandaries this lack of spiritual prowess caused me, I sometimes turned to fictionalizing.

Rachel isn’t her real name, and I’m making some other things up too. But she is, indeed, a woman of conflicting passions. Torn in the flesh. Perhaps not the kind of person you’d expect to find reading her Bible religiously. The thing is, she promised. It happened on a Sunday a number of years ago. The minister at her church, at the conclusion of his fervid sermon on the devotional life, asked everybody to stand, everybody who could promise to read some Scripture daily, and how could Rachel way up front in the third row just sit there like a heathen? Was this minister smart or what?

These magazine articles—the husband was George—weren’t your typical fare, but the Gospel Herald snatched up a number. Lamentably, I crossed the line with a piece titled “Goats and Bulls and Some Fur that Flew”:

In Sunday school George had made a tipsy comment about religious rituals—sacrifice—and set Rachel off. She’d long stewed over the Abraham-and-Isaac incident in Genesis. Why would’ve God told Abraham to butcher and roast his child? Weren’t Abraham’s aborigine neighbors already offering baby sacrifices, not just their burnt specialties like lamb kidney, calf gall bladder, birds with wrung necks? Now, in Sunday school, George wasn’t only suggesting that pious deeds couldn’t absolve a person, George was also pronouncing God’s love as unconditional, saying that nothing people might do or think could make any difference.

And then Rachel spoke up. She just had to say it. “No kidneys! No pigeon heads! No gall bladders and kidneys! God didn’t want kidneys!”

Other class members cringed. Even after the bell rang, the fur was still flying.

The Gospel Herald editor wrote back, “Sorry, but I’m going to pass on this one. That’s because of what I assume will be my readers’ reactions to the Abraham-Isaac part of the story. I’m finding many of them not too ‘kind’ when it comes to commenting on Scripture.” Evidently the atonement question presented dangerous complexities. Writing for the audience, contributing to the official, institutional mouthpiece, had its limits. Even fudging, I couldn’t delve into things.

So you could say I had little option. If I wanted to go all out, pour my soul onto the page, what other recourse? My aversion to arid, inaccessible theological exegesis—and my ignorance—plus the compulsion about not lying—would mean a story swollen with homey description and inconsequential incidents (seemingly higgledy-piggledy, but in fact not), and featuring a made-up Anna instead of Rachel, a woman hung up on just about anything imaginable, and disastrously air-headed, and married to Wade.

Writing Sticking Points, frittering years on the novel, I baldly prevaricated. A novel allowed for scandal, ribaldry, shame, faithlessness—and I took plenty advantage. No memoirist possesses such liberty. Yet when I flip through the book now, it feels close enough to the truth.

Defeatedly Anna moved around the house putting away her purchases. The two jars of mayonnaise banged into the cupboard above the toaster. The can of black olives rolled onto a different shelf. The parsley flakes, vanilla, and olive oil noisily met their appointed spots. The bundle of toilet paper landed on the bottom staircase step in the living room to wait till she went upstairs later, and so did the shampoos with their contents listed in teeny tiny print. She thought for a second, then picked up the Pear Mango Passion and brought the label close to her nose. Cocamidopropyl betaine, phooh. Sodium laureth sulfate. Ammonium xylenesulfonate. Mightn’t these horrid-sounding compounds be brain-cell soluble and carcinogenic?

Or here: Concerned that maybe nobody had fed the cat, Anna leaned over the banister to call down to Wade. He was into another radio oldie now, drowning out Percy Sledge, doo doo doo-oo doo doo dooo-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-doo-oo-oo-oo, and collecting his lunch fixings, and she heard the crisper drawer of the fridge bang open and abruptly shut.

Uh-oh, she thought, no more raw peppers? Wade’s soulful yipping and whining broke off. Was he looking in the hutch? Uh-oh. Next thing, she heard him go charging down to the cellar, and what sounded like the potato crate dragging, like he’d accidentally hooked it with his foot in the underworld shadows and was trawling it along behind him on his way over to the canning shelves. “An-na!”

Conceivably, taking Anna’s part I stayed truer to life than I thought possible.

Does the theology come across? I hope so. Had I been attempting a memoir I couldn’t have dreamed up the scintillating teacher in Wade and Anna’s Sunday school class.

Susan turned and took the chalk from the blackboard ditch. She rubbed the holder end against her chin, deliberating. Alternately, she made tiny repetitive clockwise circles in front of her, like she was practicing her penmanship. She put the chalk back down. No fluttering, her mouth pooched the whole way out to China, she looked long and hard at Wade. “There is a hell. Unless you think it’s just a fundamentalist construct.” Fun-da-men-ta-list. She ground out the word in unhappy, tight bits.

And since Susan is a mere figment, I can’t be accused of maligning. I’ve never heard a mouthful like that from anybody at church—not from Jack, either, or Brenda, Peg, Jay, the rest.

So there you have it. Not every last writer can dredge up whole reams about the did-and-done ordeals and hijinks, faithfully rendered. The writer might manage a teeny segment of the past, but not a full-blown, serious memoir. Somebody too conflicted, or hamstrung by rectitude, can only do it obliquely.

Shirley Kurtz, memoirist and novelist

Shirley seems to enjoy the relative freedom of novel writing. I can understand that. Certainly kindness and truth sometimes seem to be in conflict when writing memoir.

Shirley’s audience and editors seem to have expected a certain kind of narrative. What do you think of Shirley’s solution to that problem? Do you have any questions for Shirley? I’m sure she’ll be happy to respond. I really like her book title Growing Up Plain. I confess that I learned about the book because I was considering that title myself. Shirley got there first. Good for her!

If you want an excellent introduction to the memoir, read the Esquire essay that preceded it. Now to the exciting back story written for the 100memoirs.com audience.

THE ACCIDENTAL MEMOIRIST

By

Jon Reiner

This story begins with one man in very bad shape in a hospital bed and another man sitting across from him in a battered hospital chair. Permit me to peel back the hospital curtain.

The sorry sack in the bed is me. I’m two months out from emergency surgery that saved my life but planted so many post-surgical complications that I’m sliding toward a lousy end and in a last, desperate, counter-intuitive, medieval act, my doctors have prescribed a nothing-by-mouth sentence that will last a while longer. No food, no drink, 18 hours a day on a pump feeding me through an IV.

The visitor sinking into the springless chair is my friend Mark Warren, a Happening Guy in dark jeans, pressed white shirt and natty blazer. Mark has been a pal during my ordeal, bringing me shopping bags of galleys and review copies cleared off his desk. He’s the Executive Editor of Esquire, and we’ve known each other for a decade since our sons were in pre-school together. Mark’s been to see me several times and checked-in on the phone, as well. He’s offered good counsel to my depression and existential angst.

The room is bathed in the ghoulish green light that gets creepier when visiting hours end, which will be announced in a few minutes. “I want to talk to you about something I’ve been thinking about for a while,” Mark says, pinching the rimless glasses off his bridge and folding them into his breast pocket. His delicate features look more open and sturdy with the glasses off. “I want you to write about this experience for the magazine.”

I raise the head of the mechanical bed to sit up and reach something close to a conversational position, absorbing Mark’s offer. I speak before thinking. “Mark, I’ve been waiting for that kind of an offer for 25 years, but not for this. This is awful. No one will want to read about it. I wouldn’t want to read about it. I don’t even want to think about it.”

Before throwing up your hands and calling me an ungrateful S.O.B., I must share a little background information. For the previous quarter century I had studied and written fiction and drama, and, though I remained frustratingly unpublished and unproduced, the dream I still held was to see my name in print on the cover of a novel or on play. In fact, Mark had read my most recent manuscript just a few months earlier and helped me with introductions that led to some spectacularly enthusiastic, maddening rejections. “Jon Reiner, novelist,” yes – but this? Write about me? Write about being sick? I don’t think so.

“No, no, no,” Mark responds strongly. “The story isn’t about how miserable you are. The story is about what it’s like to have to live without food, here and outside when you’re home. What impact does food deprivation have on your life – psychologically, socially, culturally. You’re in an existential crisis. Craving what you can’t have is the embodiment. Everyone has a relationship with food. Everyone will be interested in this.

“Uh-huh.”

Mark left, and I didn’t think about the offer. I didn’t think about much but my encroaching doom, for a few days. I had asked for pen and paper immediately after I came to from the surgery and had recorded a page of notes about the shocking and surprising events that led me to Dr. Paz’s table. However, I’d stopped after a page and not returned to the notebook. My life was just so bleak, I didn’t need to plumb it on paper. But, I was thinking about food – constantly, vividly, desperately, nostalgically, hopefully – and I came back to my smart friend’s story pitch. The story is food. I also thought of a quote of John Berryman’s that I’d long loved in the abstract, and which, now, had more meaning than I ever could have imagined: “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”

Fiction shmiction. You’re a writer. You’ve been presented with a compelling story. What can you do with it?

I was discharged from the hospital and started writing, got sick again and went back in, continued writing, was discharged again and finished writing the feature story titled “The Man Who Couldn’t Eat.” It was published in the September 2009 issue of Esquire and included a full-page photograph of me. I was published. The following spring, astonishingly, excitingly, absurdly, the story won the 2010 James Beard Foundation Award for Feature Writing. I was the anti-food food writer. It’s a niche, and I’m the only member.

The story also afforded me a creative benefit I didn’t appreciate until writing. Because of my circumstances – sick, starving, afraid, depressed, unemployed, son, brother, husband, parent – I was a sympathetic character. The reader’s compassion granted me wide latitude as a protagonist, and I could probe a difficult, flawed, conflicted, interesting character without worry of offense or alienation. I could be brutally and refreshingly honest without fear of losing the reader. It was the ultimate creative liberation. Like St. Augustine, I selected my sins in the story in order to heighten the drama of my reform.

While writing the magazine story, my dear friend and old college classmate, Mitchell Waters, said, “Esquire will be a great opportunity, but I really think of this story as a book. You should, too.” Mitchell is a literary agent. He was excited by the story when it was published and offered to represent me.

“Yes, a book would be a great opportunity,” I said from my living room couch, “but if we sold the proposal to a publisher, I’d be worried about being pigeon-holed as a memoirist, a non-fiction writer. You know that my real ambition, my real love is fiction.” Okay, I do grant you permission to throw up your hands and call me an ungrateful S.O.B.

“I understand that,” Mitchell said. “But the genre really doesn’t matter now. This would be good for you, good for your health. A writer writes.”

Jon Reiner, accidental memoirist

Underestimating the blessing of friends in your life does both them and you a disservice. I did prior to this episode in my life, and haven’t since. With Mitchell’s skilled guidance, I wrote a book proposal, and he submitted it to publishers. The morning after receiving a phone call, I was sitting at a conference table inside the Simon & Schuster/Gallery Books offices. Me – inside the Simon & Schuster building! By the time I arrived at my sons’ school to pick them up that afternoon, I had an offer. The next day, we accepted. I was a 25-year overnight sensation. I was a memoirist.

The end.

There’s so much to talk about in this essay! Story as food. The advantage of disadvantage in memoir. Genre doesn’t matter. Please offer your thoughts. What lights went on for you about memoir when you read this essay?

And what about the story itself? Have you had any similar experience with food deprivation?  Know anyone who has?

]]> http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/11/08/the-accidental-memoirist-how-a-writers-rare-disease-became-the-catalyst-to-overnight-literary-success/feed/ 17 http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/10/27/composing-a-life-counterpoint-in-memoir/ http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/10/27/composing-a-life-counterpoint-in-memoir/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 15:00:14 +0000 shirleyhs http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/?p=3523 If you missed Fine Arts 101, read Lanie Tankard’s review below and click on all the links. You will enjoy the ride–especially since a lot of those links take you to countries and cities in Europe. Lanie is heading off to Singapore soon. We’re all lucky she squeezed this fine review of an excellent memoir into her crowded schedule. Since Lanie and I both have this teacher bug we’ll never get rid of, here’s more about Singapore. But be sure to come back to read the review!

[sic]

by Joshua Cody

New York: W.W. Norton, October 2011  (272 pp.).

Available in hardcover and ebook formats.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

“In memory everything seems to happen to music.”

—Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

The Latin word [sic] in brackets is a heads up to the reader that what may appear strange or incorrect has in fact been written intentionally or quoted verbatim, according to the unabridged edition of The Random House Dictionary of the English Language.

Thus, we suspect before we ever crack the spine of Joshua Cody’s new memoir about being sick, titled [sic], that we’re likely to encounter the unconventional within its pages. Indeed, that becomes so much the case that Cody may have created a new form of memoir, or at least a subgenre that redefines the approach. I’ve always been fond of intellectual nuance, and [sic] displays it in abundance.

Cody brings to writing a music composer’s ear, to memoir a forceful libretto of cancer survival, and to readers a brilliant polyphonic score played capriccio, energico, and espressivo.

Joshua Cody was a young composer in New York City about to finish a PhD at Columbia University. He had already earned a bachelor’s in music composition at Northwestern University, studied privately in Paris, had a Chicago radio show called “Music of This Century” on WNUR–FM,  cofounded the international journal and website Paris Transatlantic  as well as the Ensemble Sospeso, and written a number of articles.

Then he noticed a lump in his neck, and his life turned upside down when the tumor was diagnosed as a belligerent cancer. Cody cuts right to the chase on the first page of his memoir as he brings us along with him to begin chemotherapy, wondering, “’What’s it going to be like?’”

We hitch a ride inside his head as he’s handed orange pamphlets, “professionally printed, the Garamond font levelheaded, direct but never alarming, confidential, appropriate; poised; the thickness of the paper just right, more consequential than flimsy copy stock, but a good long way from cardboard, which would be terrifyingly permanent. The care that takes, the thought that goes into it: all the parameters are really masterfully designed, as if the hospital had hired a PhD in semiotics from Brown.”

He digresses into his thoughts as he waits, likening that period between being a patient reading the pamphlets and “the unknown experience that beckons” to “Philippe Petit on that taut tightrope between the Twin Towers.”  Cody wants specifics, like what kind of chair he’s going to be sitting in and whether he would be alone in a room.

“Are you expected to carry on a conversation with the nurse? What’s the etiquette?”

Anyone who has spent time docked in chemo ports of call, or accompanied a friend or loved one to such anchorage, will nod in recognition of Cody’s trenchant observations.

And it turns out he’s not alone in the chemo room: “I’d brought a friend, my journal.” Slowly he reels out his life, giving us the backstory of his illness and the childhood memories it triggers. He is a relative of Buffalo Bill Cody.

Joshua Cody thinks about all that is around him, all that is going into his body, all that he has experienced, and all that might happen. He follows, in fact, any line of thought when it pops up in free association. He tunes out his oncologist speaking to him in the present, wondering instead about the strong aroma of rubbing alcohol in the room.

“What was the source of the odor?”

Then he takes off pondering the meaning of happiness, considering the things he would miss if he “made it out of all this alive.”

He talks a lot about writing as he writes — metawriting. He utilizes a conversational manner to bring the reader into his stream of consciousness with phrases such as “I’ll talk more about this later” and “Why relate all this?” He points out “the literary tone I am attempting to employ.”

Cody switches from Susan Sontag to David Foster Wallace with the ease of a conductor directing a baton toward different sections of the orchestra. He transitions from Mozart to the Rolling Stones on his iPod as effortlessly as he talks about actor Ray Liotta in the movie Goodfellas in one paragraph and painter Paul Klee in the next.

Cody travels in his thoughts, rolling along wherever the train takes him. One minute we’re in Paris  with Ezra Pound, and suddenly we find ourselves in Germany: “Like this one time I was in Düsseldorf with a couple of German friends having brunch, and….” Next thing you know, he’s having his car washed in a Chicago suburb, pondering the effect of sunlight on water and glass, listening to Debussy in his head.

Suavely Cody blends remembering with theoretical musings, observations about his cancer treatments, and descriptions of the sex and drugs he turns to for escape. It’s a virtuoso performance.

He begins to experience chemophobias. He sees a psycho-oncologist. He compares the chemotherapy that has just failed him with the radiation that is supposed to save him. His mother arrives to assist, and we see pages of her notes. He reproduces his calendar, covered from corner to corner with medical appointments.

“Being sick is very much a full-time job,” he comments.

Cody is aware of the “immediate stimuli of the present moment” bombarding him along with the “recalled stimuli of the past.” He notes, “And these two layers wrap around each other like two electric currents encircling some wobbly magnetic pole.”

He tells us of his marriage to a Bulgarian girl named Valentina and his fake imprisonment in a pretend hospital room to assist the Kádár government of Hungary in a propaganda charade, with fake IVs in his chest and arms.

His mother arrives, and he tells her they can leave to go to the limo waiting outside because the pretense is over. When he rips out the fake IVs, pretend blood spurts out. Pretend nurses rush in, while eeeevvvver so gradually he is made to understand that everything is very real indeed — that he is in the hospital for a bone marrow transplant and he is having a morphine fantasy.

“Well it just goes to show things are not what they seem.” That line from the Sixties song “Sister Morphine” is an appropriate summation of the events in Chapter 5, which is also aptly titled “Sister Morphine.”

Mick Jagger,  Keith Richards, and Marianne Faithfull cowrote the lyrics to this haunting song. The Stones and Faithfull each recorded “Sister Morphine.”

Recently (October 10, 2011), I heard Faithfull perform the song on her Horses and High Heels tour at Rotterdam’s  Nieuwe Luxor Theater, where this highly talented woman who has battled both morphine and cancer received two rousing standing ovations for her marvelous show. Click here for her performance of “Sister Morphine” at the Citadel Festival in Berlin on May 29, 2011.

As for Joshua Cody: “They took me off the morphine that night and switched me to fentanyl.” He turns to Freud, Darwin, and Nietzsche to make sense of it all, saying, “The crystalline clarity of this morphine delusion proves, perhaps, the Nietzschean maxim that ‘some situations are so bad that to remain sane is insane.’”

Cody considers creativity, memory, subtext, and voice in memoir — asking: “So what, exactly, separates a sharp memory of early childhood, say, from a morphine delusion, or an image seen in a dream from an image read in a book? They’re all equally tangible, equally intangible products of electromechanical signaling.”

These questions are the kind of research done by neuroscientists like David Eagleman, who spoke at the Texas Book Festival on October 23 about his new book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. He noted there are as many connections in one neuron as there are stars in the Milky Way. A NOVA profile explores Eagleman’s investigation of the question: “How does the brain construct reality using the information it takes in?”

Cody debates why certain things bring comfort during hospitalizations for such traumatic events as bone marrow transplants, reminding us “finding sources of pleasure is an important aspect of dealing with high levels of pain.” He compares painters and writers, saying writers are “unjustly burdened by the weight of words.”

Cody examines his parents’ marriage and divorce, and his relationship with his father, who tried to make it as a writer but never did.

Author Jonathan Franzen has also trekked in this territory of memory, particularly in “My Father’s Brain” in How To Be Alone: Essays. Indeed, Franzen makes an appearance in Cody’s memoir several times. (I reviewed Franzen’s most recent book, Freedom, on 100 Memoirs when it came out last year: Part I and Part II.) When I heard Franzen interviewed by Lev Grossman in Austin recently, Franzen mentioned that he was reading [sic], calling it a “weird memoir by an overarticulate guy with cancer — really good.”

Cody underscores the important role his mother played in helping him during his treatments, taking notes and running interference with hospital personnel. He writes, “My mother’s transcription of the dialogue between patient, doctor, caretaker, and pain management staff is fascinating in its expression of the fragile complexity in calibrating the collaboration of different specialists.”

He explains what it means to be in discomfort, he weighs nonbeing versus aging, and he relates the feeling of his near-death experience during the bone marrow transplant. He tells us what suffering is like for the sufferer, and comes close to suicide until he realizes he wants to kill the disease, not himself. Cody knows he’s getting better when he begins to feel boredom, and then says to his mother as they’re finally leaving the hospital, “I love traffic.”

He worries the night before he has to return for more scan results. He can’t sleep, so he sits down to write in his journal, remembering his father’s advice: “write it out, write it out.” He wonders if he’s losing his mind.

“Just keep pen to paper,” he tells himself.

“I am trying very hard,” he replies.

He wraps up his book with “the motif of journals and memoirs” and discusses “’journals’ as opposed to notebooks,” quoting David Byrne  on this arcane point.

Finally Cody admits he’s a bit tired.

“This book turned out to be a little longer than I thought, and way more work. Plus I’m hungry.”

He ends with a crescendo of framing.

As Victor Hugo put it in his essay on William Shakespeare, “Music expresses that which cannot be said, and which cannot be suppressed.”

Joshua Cody is a maestro and his words will ring in my ears for a long time. Bravo!

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Photo by Jessica H. Tankard, Amsterdam

Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

]]> http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/10/27/composing-a-life-counterpoint-in-memoir/feed/ 2 http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/10/21/sisterhood-of-the-wild-rose-a-review-of-moonlight-on-linoleum/ http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/10/21/sisterhood-of-the-wild-rose-a-review-of-moonlight-on-linoleum/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 15:53:25 +0000 shirleyhs http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/?p=3504 I met Terry Helwig when she brought her amazing Thread Project to The Fetzer Institute several years ago. I could tell then that her passion for peace comes from a deep place. Lanie Tankard’s review of Helwig’s new memoir confirms the resilient transformation that made her mature contribution to peacemaking possible.

Moonlight on Linoleum: A Daughter’s Memoir

by Terry Helwig

 Foreword by Sue Monk Kidd

New York: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster, October 2011 (304 pp.).

Available in hardcover, paperback, and ebook formats.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

“It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”

—Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

You know you’re in for a bumpy ride from the very first sentence of Terry Helwig’s new book, Moonlight on Linoleum: A Daughter’s Memoir. When an author can’t even locate her mother’s grave because she doesn’t know her last name, the reader’s senses go on alert. Helwig’s mother had married so many times, her daughter lost track of which appellation she was using when she died.

Helwig became a mother herself way too early as a child, long before she ever gave birth to her own daughter as an adult. She spent her formative years taking care of five younger sisters, one of whom was actually a cousin.

Helwig presents her mother, Carola Jean, as a wild rose who married at fourteen — lying about her age to become the wife of a twenty-two-year-old tenant farmer. Helwig was born eleven months later.

Carola Jean knew nothing about how to run a household. By the time Helwig was eighteen, her mother had been married to three different men (one several times) and befriended many others. “Going to Timbuktu” became her mother’s euphemism for carousing in bars.

There is child abandonment and abuse, alcohol and drugs, attempted suicide, a stint in a mental hospital, and finally an overdose on the part of Carola Jean — and yet through it all, Helwig shepherds her siblings to happy adulthoods. Their current close-knit bond began when “we forged an indestructible ring of sisterhood that helped keep all of us afloat.” In fact, Helwig drew upon their collective memories when she wrote this memoir.

During her childhood, she employs varying methods to make it through the tough times. One day, she plays the Car-Counting Game while wondering if her mother will ever come to pick her up. Another day, she tells herself, “I’ll be so glad when I forget this.”

The memoir is reminiscent of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, with less powerful prose. Details are sketchy at times. The book ends somewhat abruptly, with a large chunk of Helwig’s life omitted before the Epilogue. Still, the story presented is testimony to the triumph of the human spirit.

Two people can experience very similar hardships in childhood, yet evolve into very different adults. How does one person use those terrible memories to strengthen the soul while another watches the very life force ground away by them?

Memoir has a way of getting at the heart of this question through the sharing of tales in what ultimately becomes a collective storehouse of insights. The act of placing those painful memories on paper is cathartic for a writer. And Helwig has reached a position of objectivity regarding Carola Jean — assessing the full spectrum of her personality traits, bad as well as good. Still, the various fathers in the book seem to have many more redeeming qualities.

For readers, knowledge of other lives can certainly help us view our own in comparison, and learn coping strategies.

Sue Monk Kidd, in her foreword to Moonlight on Linoleum, uses the word redemption to describe the story told within. That’s a fitting way to characterize someone like Terry Helwig. Her itinerant family barely stays in a town long enough for the girls to finish out a grade level. Over the span of eleven years, Helwig attended twelve different schools. Thus, as a child, she didn’t identify with “one particular school, group of friends, town, or state.” Instead of becoming bitter, however, Helwig associated herself “with something larger, more inclusive, the sum of many parts — like humanity….”

Growing up in this nomadic and unpredictable family, Helwig found her own compass points. “My familiar landmarks had become, by necessity, overarching — the stars, sunsets, and moonrises. These were my constants. I knew the earth as a mountain, field, canyon, desert, and sea. My roots weren’t anchored to a particular neighborhood, yet they sunk deep into the earth….”

Helwig eventually rose above her childhood to become a counselor and create The Thread Project: “Some say our world is hanging by a thread. I say — a thread is all we need,” she states.

I’d call that resilience, which the American Psychological Association defines as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or even significant sources of stress — such as family and relationship problems, serious health problems, or workplace and financial stressors. It means ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences.”

Terry Helwig definitely bounced, and her reverberations are global.

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Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.

]]> http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/10/21/sisterhood-of-the-wild-rose-a-review-of-moonlight-on-linoleum/feed/ 13 http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/10/04/take-a-roadtrip-in-your-armchair-the-road-to-somewhere-by-james-a-reeves/ http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/10/04/take-a-roadtrip-in-your-armchair-the-road-to-somewhere-by-james-a-reeves/#comments Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:29:37 +0000 shirleyhs http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/?p=3449 Lanie Tankard, reviewer extraordinaire and world traveler, is about to set off for distant lands – again. Before she left, however, she sent in this review. Reading it is an adventure in itself. Enjoy!

The Road to Somewhere cover

The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir. New York: W.W. Norton, August 2011 (411 pages)

by James A. Reeves

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

“Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”—Jack Kerouac, On the Road (Part 2)

I took a road trip with James Reeves.

We crisscrossed the grid of this country together, along all the highways and byways, up and down, back and forth, flipping the dial listening to snippets of talk radio to pass the time during fifty-five thousand miles. Along the way, he pondered what he was seeing and hearing, offering observations much like a sociologist would. He photographed interesting scenes along the roadside, calling my attention to images not normally found in travel brochures.

I didn’t want to get out when the Dollar Rent A Car finally ground to a halt five years later in New Orleans, for Reeves had opened his heart on the pages of The Road to Somewhere: An American Memoir and I wanted to keep reading. I truly felt as though I had been in the car with him, so vivid and personal was his writing.

He drove many roads I remember well, and described many towns I know, yet he viewed them from a different perspective and showed me angles I’d missed when I’d been there. Reeves pulled back the curtains of fly-by-night lodgings to peer out the windows at the hidden landscape of America, desperately trying to find a place for himself in it beyond all the Waffle Houses.

What is it that a man is supposed to do, expected to be, required to accomplish? He breaks down his quest for the answers into sections titled Men, Country, Work, Home, Discipline, God, Guts, and Strength.

Driven partly by grief over the sudden loss of his mother, he combines his quest for meaning with his journey through mourning. Reeves adds to the mix photos from his own family and childhood, blending them with memories of his grandfather, his father, and his mother to create a poignant, elegant, thought-provoking memoir unlike any I’ve ever seen.

He takes the “Road to Nowhere,”  á la the Talking Heads 1985 song, and turns it into The Road to Somewhere. Tina Weymouth, David Byrne, Chris Frantz, and Jerry Harrison penned the song lyrics this way:

“Well we know where we’re goin’

But we don’t know where we’ve been

And we know what we’re knowin’

But we can’t say what we’ve seen.”

Reeves, on the other hand, has no idea where he’s going, but he’s sure trying very hard to say what he’s seen. He does so in a scientific, dispassionate way at times, and occasionally  bares his soul on the printed page.

He wonders whether other countries “hold such a passion for their highways,” if our country is too big, what people are picking up in all their pickup trucks, why a shocked woman is standing in the middle of the road in a negligee clutching a cat at 2 a.m. on his drive through the Smoky Mountains — “Just needed a walk,” she tells him.

He notices, “everyone has a device nowadays,” adding “I have no idea what everyone is up to behind their little screens.”  When you can see which newspaper someone is reading or the cover of the book that person is holding, “I can judge you.” In that sense, he notes, technology has taken away our ability to evaluate one another. What might that mean? He wonders at what point handwriting might no longer be required.

Reeves pushes ideas to the brink, saying, “I drive to the edges of things.” He stops to spend time at places that interest him, such as the Cosmic Ray Center in Utah.

Ultimately he sees “There’s kindness on the road.” After his mother dies, he notices his father shuffling around the house, sighing.

“I told him to pack a bag. We’re going for a drive. That’s my answer to everything.”

The tender memories Reeves shares about his mother are some of the most touching parts of the book. The reader can almost see the love. He went beyond her charge to “go out into the world and look around” — he also contemplated what he saw. He photographed it and he wrote about it. And then he bound it between two covers and dedicated it to her, adding, “I miss you.”

A.A. Milne put it this way: “Pay attention to where you are going because without meaning you might get nowhere.” James Reeves, I feel sure, will end up somewhere.

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]]> http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/10/04/take-a-roadtrip-in-your-armchair-the-road-to-somewhere-by-james-a-reeves/feed/ 7 http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/09/22/a-query-critique-focusing-on-the-hook-taking-care-of-mother-when-mother-didnt-take-care-of-you/ http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/2011/09/22/a-query-critique-focusing-on-the-hook-taking-care-of-mother-when-mother-didnt-take-care-of-you/#comments Thu, 22 Sep 2011 16:21:30 +0000 shirleyhs http://www.shirleyshowalter.com/?p=3394 Marla Miller, of Marketing the Muse, explains to a writer with excellent credentials how to make her query letter stand out by strengthening the “hook”:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4_RJz3VPtk&w=640&h=360]

I agreed with Marla’s advice. Did you? Would you want to read a memoir on this subject? How do you determine a good “hook” in your own writing? Do you have a good critic who helps you?

September 11, 2001 by Erma Martin Yost

My first post on 9-11 this week asked for stories. One friend, artist Erma Martin Yost could not just write a comment. Her heart and mind were bursting. So she sent me an essay, which I immediately asked permission to share. As journalists search for stories of hope, I wonder how many of them have told this kind of story? Erma tells an honest story of hope and courage.

By Erma Martin Yost

Memories that touch my heart most are those of the young children fleeing nearby schools. One young child asked his teacher, “why are the birds on fire?” The “birds” were falling human bodies.

A little child. . .

Another image is the photo of two-year old Patricia Smith pictured in the NY Times leaving the stage with her father after the Police Department’s highest award was hung around her neck in honor of her mother, also a police officer. On the 5^th anniversary of 9/11 she was pictured again.  I wonder if her photo will appear again this year.  As a two-year-old, she holds on to her father with one hand and sucks her fingers with another. Clearly she cannot comprehend what is happening. Her picture in The New York Times reached right out and grabbed me. It seemed to symbolize all the losses–of life, of innocence, of a sense of security within the “homeland,” that strange new word we all now speak.

Constant Code Orange

           For 27 years prior to 9/11 my photographer husband Leon and I lived in Jersey City just six blocks in from the banks of the Hudson River directly across from the World Trade Towers. Since that day we were never not under “Code Orange.” We stayed an additional seven years after, but the memories and daily reminders of that fateful day eventually became too much. We now spend most of our time living in Carlisle, PA, where rightly or wrongly there is a greater sense of safety, free from the frequent terror alerts and constant sense of fear.

My story of 9-11: A Survivor’s Tale

             On that bright beautiful Tuesday morning of 9/11/01, I went out the front door to go to a water aerobics class only to find the street and sidewalk filled with neighbors looking east towards the Hudson River. I turned to follow their gaze and saw the horrific sight of the first tower burning (lined up with the end of our block). Shortly, I witnessed the impact of the second plane which shook the ground so hard it buckled the knees of us standing there and the image of that orange fire ball burned into my memory permanently.

An index finger. . . a forearm

I knew a friend of ours worked above where that plane hit. All that was ever found of him was an index finger and forearm.

My student’s voice on 911

More friends and neighbors perished, as did a former student of mine. The only civilian 911 tape that was released to the public was that student’s call and she was on the line until she was overcome and died. Victims from the WTC towers and surrounding buildings fled to piers on our side of the river on anything that floated. Still covered with ash, they walked past our house looking for their homes, cars, and any way to get away. There were many more horrific sights that on day and in the days and weeks and months that followed.

Twisted steel and lights

The iconic twisted burning metal that everyone is so familiar with was lit with bright lights at night for three months, a beacon for rescue workers, but also a glow in our bedroom. At first the smells included that of burning flesh, and the acrid smell of burning plastics continued for months permeating bedding, clothes hanging in the closets, curtains, anything absorbent. The drone of fighter planes flying their circuit’s overhead every few minutes sounded like buzz saws inside our house. There was the constant pull of wanting to stand with friends in spontaneous meeting places and wanting to stay inside the “safety” of one’s home.

Some stayed. Some fled. We did both.

Someone said there were those who stayed and those who fled.  In the immediate days, months, and years that followed Leon and I tried to stay. We knew from the beginning of this tragedy that city life had changed forever and assumed that one day we would adjust to the changes. Eventually the decision was made to move, as did many of our friends. Within the first year of living in Carlisle, PA, we met several families that had moved there too, their hometown, having fled life in the Big Apple. I hope such people are not viewed as quitters, non resilient, or not hopeful. Our new beginnings just have to take place elsewhere.

Bio: Leon and Erma Yost bought a row house in Jersey City in 1974 where they lived and maintained their artists’ studios for 36 years. They also worked in Manhattan, going through the World Trade Center many times a week on the PATH trains. In 1993 Erma missed the bombing of the WTC by perhaps minutes. She had taken the PATH train into the towers, went outside to buy art supplies and when she returned a short time later, people were running out of Tower One. No emergency crews had even arrived yet and no one knew what had just transpired. The crater that the bomb left was on the PATH platform where she had just departed the train.

Spring Song, 2011 by Erma Martin Yost

Wow, Erma. Thank you so much for this gift. You challenge us to think about the many ways to make “new beginnings.” I hope 12-year-old Patricia Smith will somehow find this essay and know how important she is to you and to all of us.

When we help others heal, and when we tell truthful stories of how we have wrestled with the twin angels called Courage and Hope, we heal a little more of our own wounds. Shalom. Now, what are YOUR stories?