Word: dahlberg
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...Dahlberg's autobiography also opens with a joyous tribute. As though he were beginning a rolling, sonorous poem, Dahlberg writes...
...heart of Dahlberg's autobiography is a biography of his mother, Lizzie. A lady barber, she searches throughout her life for customers for her shop, food for her kitchen...
...reviewing the story of his orphanage days told in Bottom Dogs, the autobiography amplifies the tortuous relationship between son and mother. There is sacrifice and love and anger but no accusations about Lizzie's poverty or promiscuity--"unlike Hamlet, I cannot accuse the womb that begat me." In fact Dahlberg shares Lizzie's searches for love, for sex and for enough food to live and for enough peace to enjoy living. And these searches provide the constant goals--or mirages--in an otherwise rambling book...
...Dahlberg's critical works explore the loneliness of the American author, this curse of Ishmael which he himself bears. But in his autobiography he records the loneliness of a boy who does not know his father's name, asking in his agony...
...main problem which mother and son share is not the loneliness of their spirits but rather the desires of their flesh. In long, detailed passages, Dahlberg reveals his own passion, his adolescent frustration and its eventual satisfaction. In theory, these pages should resemble the autobiographies of such authors as Lawrence, Mailer and even Rousseau, all of whom describe their own sex lives in minute detail. Yet such comparisons are singularly inadequate. And the reason for this, the difference between Dahlberg's book and other autobiographies, explains the power of Because I Was Flesh...