This memoir, packed with eccentrics, is beautifully eccentric in its own right. Karr evokes the contours of her preadolescent mind - the fears, fights and petty jealousies - with extraordinary and often comic vividness. This is one of the best books ever written about growing up in America. Her father was an oil refinery worker, a brawling yet taciturn man who came most fully alive when telling tall stories, often in the back room of a bait shop, with a group of men called “The Liars’ Club.” She was married seven times, and was subject to psychotic episodes. Her mother, who “fancied herself a kind of bohemian Scarlett O’Hara,” had a wild streak. You can almost say about Mary Karr’s agile prose what she says about herself at the age of 7: “I was small-boned and skinny, but more than able to make up for that with sheer meanness.”Īs a girl, Karr was a serious settler of scores, willing to bite anyone who had wronged her or to climb a tree with a BB gun to take aim at an entire family. This incendiary memoir, about the author’s childhood in the 1960s in a small industrial town in Southeast Texas, was published in 1995 and helped start the modern memoir boom. Both worthy ambitions, but I’m thankful she wrote this indelible memoir instead. The young Kingston resolves to become a lumberjack and a newspaper reporter. The narrative undulates, shifting between ghost world, real world and family lore. There’s Mao’s revolution, which is supposed to upend the old feudal system that kept her female ancestors trapped in servitude (if they weren’t victims of infanticides as unwanted baby girls) but also imposes its own deadly cruelty, preventing her parents from returning home. There’s the postwar California of her childhood, where she has to unlearn the “strong and bossy” voices of the Chinese women in her family in favor of an “American-feminine” whisper. There’s the Chinese village of Kingston’s ancestors, where girls learn the song of the warrior woman while being told they are destined to become a wife and a slave. The American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants, Kingston navigates a bewildering journey between worlds, each one stifling yet perforated by inconsistencies.
True stories, ghost stories, “talk stories” - Maxine Hong Kingston whirs them all together to produce something wild and astonishing that still asserts itself with a ruthless precision. This book is more than four decades old, but I can’t think of another memoir quite like it that has been published since. The confidence of her tone in “Fierce Attachments” reminds me of the Saul Bellow who wrote, in the opening lines of “The Adventures of Augie March,” “I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way.” - Dwight Garner Gornick’s language is so fresh and so blunt it’s a quintessentially American voice, and a beautiful one. There’s a clarity to this memoir that’s so brilliant it's unsettling Gornick finds a measure of freedom in her writing and her feminist activism, but even then, she and her mother can never let each other go. I love this book - even during those moments when I want to scream at Gornick, which are the times when she becomes the hypercritical, constantly disappointed woman that her mother, through her words and example, taught the author to be. It’s a portrait of the artist as she finds a language - original, allergic to euphemism and therapeutic banalities - worthy of the women that raised her. The book is propelled by Gornick’s attempts to extricate herself from the stifling sorrow of her home - first through sex and marriage, but later, and more reliably, through the life of the mind, the “glamorous company” of ideas. That fearlessness suffuses this book she stares unflinchingly at all that is hidden, difficult, strange, unresolvable in herself and others - at loneliness, sexual malice and the devouring, claustral closeness of mothers and daughters. When Gornick’s father died suddenly, she looked in the coffin for so long that she had to be pulled away. It has taken me 30 years to understand how much of them I understood.” “I absorbed them as I would chloroform on a cloth laid against my face.
“I remember only the women,” Vivian Gornick writes near the start of her memoir of growing up in the Bronx tenements in the 1940s, surrounded by the blunt, brawling, yearning women of the neighborhood, chief among them her indomitable mother.
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