Word: memoirize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lessing's book, an account of her childhood on the frontlines of her parents' horrific memories, is an unusual work in two parts. The first half, a novella, imagines the lives her parents could have lived in England had the war never occurred; the second half, a memoir, recounts how their lives actually unfolded in their mud-brick farmhouse in Rhodesia. Together, they form a painful meditation on family and war, one in which the distance between dreams and reality is measured with disappointment. Lessing's life, we discover, falls in the chasm between them...
Frail and weary she may be, but Lessing still writes with the deftness and nuance that characterized her 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, one of the past century's most influential feminist works. In the memoir, she describes her father being lowered into a mine shaft, "his wooden leg sticking out and banging against its rocky sides," and reminisces about him hobbling over tree stumps and up hills to keep watch as she explored the veldt. In Alfred's imagined life, she makes him the successful farmer he wanted to be, and rids him of the diabetes that rendered...
...that her mother's war wounds, though less visible, ran as deep as her father's - and she endeavors to heal them. In the novella, she envisions her mother as what she could have been, a teacher and philanthropist, not the "demented" woman that war had made her. The memoir honors that potential, too. "The real Emily McVeagh was an educator, who told stories and brought me books," Lessing writes. "I owe to her, my mother, my introduction to books, reading - all that has been my life." In moments like this, Lessing sees past their tortured relationship and uses...
...moral code of McCain's youth always distinguished between sins of honor and sins of pleasure. "Don't lie, cheat or steal - anything else is fair game," McCain told his son Jack when the boy left for the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md. In his memoir, McCain recalls that by his mid-20s, he "had begun to aspire to a reputation for more commendable achievements than long nights of drinking and gambling...
MADONNA'S BROTHER writes unauthorized memoir. Because we know so few of her secrets...