Word: memoire
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Rather than with Bridget, curl up with Nuala O'Faolain (Are You Somebody: The Accidental Memoir of a Dublin Woman) and Julia Scully (Outside Passages), who elicit a hundred now-isn't-that-the-truth moments. O'Faolain, a celebrated columnist at the Irish Times, is more than a female Frank McCourt. While she's no slouch at depicting old-sod poverty--sleeping with a scrap of sheet to keep her father's overcoat from scratching her chin and dreaming of a place to hang her ragged clothes--her real strength is in her close-to-the-bone rendering...
Like O'Faolain, Julia Scully uses the memoir to reveal yourself to you. The primer begins in the emotional void of a San Francisco orphanage where Scully ends up after her father's suicide. By the time she rejoins her hapless mother for a make-do life in a makeshift roadhouse in godforsaken Alaska, "the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke" is perfume to her, the rough miners princes. She works like a dog and builds an inner structure that gets her to Stanford and then to New York City, where she becomes a successful editor...
...hiding from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic along with her parents, her sister and four other people. Two years later, all were captured. Frank did not survive, but her book did--discovered after the war. In its translations and adaptations, it became the best-known personal memoir of the Holocaust years...
What struck him most, as his memoir, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, attests, was the ceremonial vigor of the people. Ranging from almost European pale to jet black, the Negroes of New Orleans had many social clubs, parades and picnics. With rags, blues, snippets from opera, church music and whatever else, a wide breadth of rhythm and tune was created to accompany or stimulate every kind of human involvement. Before becoming an instrumentalist, Armstrong the child was either dancing for pennies or singing for his supper with a strolling quartet of other kids who wandered New Orleans freshening...
...think it's irrelevant," Ross replies to the question people are asking: Why publish a memoir about your 40-year relationship with a married man while his wife, whom you say you are fond of, is still alive? "There were no secrets, really, that were divulged," Ross says firmly. "We never went underground, and he [Shawn] talked with her [Cecille] about what was happening with him and with me immediately...