memoir, biography

Review: ‘Talk Thai’ memoir

January 9, 2011 | One Comment

Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy by Ira Sukrungruang. University of Missouri Press, 169 pages People have two desires that, however fervent, are contradictory. They want to stand out, and they want to fit in. I think memoirs of overt dual identity appeal because they crystallize this universal dilemma. Growing up in the 1980s in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn, Ira Sukrungruang was not only Asian but obese. He had that Hebrew first name—his parents had picked it …

[Read More]

Noted: A moving essay on loss

December 17, 2010 | 6 Comments

The current New Yorker (December 13, 2010) includes an essay by Joyce Carol Oates, “A Widow’s Story,” subtitled “The last week of a long marriage,” about the unexpected swift decline and death of Oates’s husband of forty-seven years, the editor Raymond Smith, at age seventy-seven. “So much to say in a marriage, so much unsaid,” she writes simply of her regret. “You assume that there will be other times, other occasions. Years.” Here’s an excerpt: Ray read little of my …

[Read More]

Noted: A dark view of memoir

November 28, 2010 | 4 Comments

In a withering New Yorker review this week (November 29’s issue) of George W. Bush’s Decision Points, billed as a memoir, George Packer says, “Very few of its four hundred and ninety-three pages are not self-serving.” But then “every memoir is a tissue of omission and evasion,” he opines. Incidentally, Packer calls Bush’s book sententious: “1. abounding in pithy aphorisms or maxims: a sententious book. 2. given to excessive moralizing; self-righteous,” according to dictionary.com. Interesting how close sententious is to …

[Read More]

3rd scene from my memoir

November 23, 2010 | 8 Comments

On a cold morning in late winter I’m driving home to the farm after a Friday breakfast date in town with Kathy. The Muslim students are returning to kill six lambs. This is Islam’s highest holy day, the Festival of Sacrifice, and will be a big feast night after a long day of fasting. Eid-al-Adha commemorates the willingness of the prophet Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son to Allah.  At the last moment, Allah allows the substitution of a ram. …

[Read More]

2nd scene from my memoir

November 12, 2010 | 8 Comments

(This scene, from seven chapters after the first one I posted, isn’t quite as packed, and perhaps the characters introduced last time are becoming clearer.) Mom called me at the office from our house with news to report: “A man was just here asking for you. He wanted to make sure you gave him permission to hunt, because your neighbor is upset.” “What was he driving?” “A big green pickup.” “That’s Ed McNabb. He lives on the other side of …

[Read More]

A scene from my memoir

November 6, 2010 | 15 Comments

I walked into Ernie’s & Jim’s Barbershop, clutching a stack of old issues of The Stockman Grassfarmer and Jim’s horse-training videotape, and arrived to find the shop empty except for Jim. He lounged in his barber chair, smoking a Marlboro, roosting in the window wall’s golden light like an old-time porch-sitter, doing nothing with palpable enjoyment, one of those people who can sit and think. I knew he was dreaming about his farm. Jim had warmed to my proselytizing about …

[Read More]

For teachers & kind souls elsewhere

October 26, 2010 | 9 Comments

“Ideals and opportunities and social theorizing are just fine, but if you must understand only one thing, it is this: a warm hand and words whispered into the ear are what we want. Paths that can be seen and followed and walked upon are what we most need. “And in the end, the thing that feeds us, no matter how tenuous, is what we will reach for.” This excerpt is from Ghostbread, a memoir by Sonja Livingston. University of Georgia …

[Read More]