Coming Home to Roost
In a previous post called Blogging and the Memoir Community I promised to review DeWitt Henry’s memoir called Safe Suicide because he was the first published author who found me through this blog. Here goes, DeWitt. Hope you come back to read this little review.
Safe Suicide has an internal subtitle which describes its structure and genre–narratives, essays, and meditations. Most of the chapters were published previously in literary journals. The publisher is Red Hen Press. Since publishing individual essays first is one of the routes I am considering in my own writing, I was especially interested to see how a complete set of essays, beginning with a memoir of the author’s father and concluding with a meditation on aging, would either hang together or seem fragmented.
The answer I discovered is–both. As a product of a postmodern life in academe (a long career at Emerson College), the author is highly conscious of fragments, employing them deliberately. Most of the essays highlight fragments in their structure, using subheadings or little printer’s breaks to indicate the loss of linear progress. This lack of flow in the short run, however, does not stop the stream of consciousness. As one thought or memory leaves off, another picks up–like rivulets of beaded water flowing over a dusty riverbed. The necessary repetition of certain facts in separate essays does not seem jarring but accumulates force. We see the author’s wife Connie, for example, through many different lenses–as teacher, lover, mother, dog catcher, partner, and independent thinker. The same is true of the sister, brothers, nephew, parents, and colleagues who enter and exit the various stories in different roles.
Amazingly, the author, who has been honest with us about his negative feelings toward his obese, recovered/alcoholic father, and who has steadfastly refused a sentimental view of any family member, returns in his own old age to some of the same values his father held. Like his father, he takes delight in the growth and progress of his children, even more after they leave home than before. And like his father, he recognizes the power–even saving power–of the women in his life.
I would probably not chosen to read a book called Safe Suicide without encouragement from the author. But I am glad I got past an initial aversion to the title to experience deeply the pastiche of a life as noble in its ordinariness as my own–or yours. I recognized, and loved, the many Shakespearian allusions sprinkled through these essays. DeWitt Henry is an English professor’s English professor. He does not just read the richest texts in the English language; he literally takes them to heart. Art is life and life is art in this memoir.
Henry concludes his last essay with words that summarize the philosophy that ties all the fragments of his life together: “Life itself is our glory and our ordeal, our measure of heart, and of passion. We do our best. There is no finish line.”
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Blogging and the Memoir Community Online
By Shirley H. Showalter
There are more than 150,000,000 bloggers. I joined the enormous online ocean less than six months ago, and I learn a new swim stroke every day. Authors are beginning to find this site, and I am beginning to locate memoir authors, teachers, and speakers. I thought I would point out three people I have found and give my readers a chance to go to their sites if you have not already done so.
Jerry Waxler commented on my post about the memoir Left to Tell a month ago. He introduced me to the memoir community online. Here’s his blog. I have not had enough time to explore this community fully, but I will make incursions into it, and I am grateful to know that there are organizations like the National Association of Memoir Writers. Jerry has an amazing set of essays about memoir, an e-book, and a blog roll with many memoir sites posted on it. He’s an aggregator as well as a blogger. Thanks, Jerry!
The first memoir author to come to this site is DeWitt Henry, author of the memoir Safe Suicide. I was so happy to have his interest that I immediately bought a copy of his book, which you can do also just by clicking on the bookcover. Isn’t that cool?
I not only am giving him this plug before ever reading his book, but I plan to review it after it arrives from Amazon. Only the first author to contact me gets this kind of call out, and who knows whether I will like the book. But I am grateful to DeWitt for illustrating one of the possibilities for this blog–contact with authors. He also pointed me to a literary journal, Ploughshares, published by Emerson College, where he teaches in the MFA program. Dewitt did not comment on a particular post but found my bio and commented. Fun surprise!
Another discovery I made in the last week is Lisa Dale Norton, a blogger with The Huffington Post, one of my favorite sources for political news. I signed up to be one of Lisa’s fans because her posts align perfectly with the “memoir in the news” category I began a few weeks ago when the role of narrative in the presidential campaigns seemed to strike me, and apparently many others, as really significant. Lisa has published a recent book about memoir. I hope to get to that book some day, too.
One of the luxuries of beginning this blogging journey is that I have a small enough community to introduce folks to each other. This post is like a cocktail party–without those funny paper umbrellas to stick in the drinks!
