MEMOIRS | READING AND WRITING
Five Famous Memoirs I Read in 2022
Good writing begins with reading
I’ve been reading a lot of memoir lately, and these books are some of the juggernauts I read last year.
The Glass Castle - Jeannette Walls
A friend gave me this fifteen years ago as I struggled to cope with my husband’s alcoholism and irrational behavior and feared what we were doing to our children. This book gave me hope that we weren’t ruining them forever (thankfully, we didn’t).
When I revisited it, I got the audiobook. The author herself narrates, and I enjoyed listening to her tell her own tales.
Jeannette Walls and her siblings grew up in dysfunction but parented themselves into successful adults. The kids moved to New York City as adults; their parents followed and became homeless but chose to live that way rather than conform to societal pressures.
She describes with love and compassion her brilliant, fascinating father who made wild promises but drank too much and didn’t keep them (or a job) and her eccentric, bohemian mother who couldn’t be bothered with pedestrian realities such as jobs and domestic obligations.
The family moved around a lot, and the children were often hungry and disappointed in their parents, but they experienced fun and adventure along with neglect and chaos. A journalist, Walls writes as an observer, not a critic, telling the events as they happened and letting the reader/listener feel the impact of her stories.
Ultimately, she weaves a tale of perseverance, forgiveness, and hope. I haven’t seen the movie, but it’s on my list.
Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Women’s Prison - Piper Kerman
People kept mentioning this TV show to me when my friend Lisa was in jail. It was popular on Netflix then, but I’d never watched it. I didn’t know it was based on a memoir until recently.
In her youth, Piper Kerman got involved with an exotic older woman who turned out to be a drug runner and got Kerman to transport a suitcase of money overseas. A decade later, when she’s more settled and mature and engaged to be married, the smuggling ring is busted and her bad choice catches up with her. She serves time in the federal women’s prison in Danbury, CT.
In dozens of letters from both county jails while she awaited trial and federal prison after she was sentenced, Lisa relayed the same experiences Kerman expertly describes. I also learned some things Lisa had not understood that had seemed inexplicable, such as how prisoner transport works.
The daily humiliations and indignities forced on inmates are hard to read; we treat warehoused humans less kindly than animals. But Kerman is warm, funny, and non-judgmental about her fellow inmates, and her compassion reminds us they are complex human beings (many were mothers convicted of non-violent drug crimes), and the U.S. prison system is broken.
As educated, upper-middle-class white women, both Kerman and Lisa had the benefit of privilege, and their backgrounds and support systems undoubtedly made a huge difference in their ability to successfully assimilate back into life on the outside. I often wonder how both Kerman’s and Lisa’s fellow inmates fared once they were released.
Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail - Cheryl Strayed
This might sound like a book about hiking, but it’s really about grief: how it ravaged her body and soul and how she finally healed herself.
Cheryl Strayed gives an unflinching account of her self-destructive choices after her beloved mother died from cancer when she was twenty-two. Bereft and lost, she drops out of school and turns to strangers for distraction. She has unprotected sex, devolves into drug use, and at one point becomes pregnant with a heroin addict’s baby.
I wanted to reach through the pages and shake sense into her at the same time I admire how she bared her pain and failures with no justifications or rationalizations.
To get her head on straight again, Strayed impulsively decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, though she has no hiking experience. The book follows her journey, including the people, animals, and scenery she encounters, while occasionally flashing back to show how she got there. She stumbles through the outer wilderness of the trail and the inner wilderness of loss and learns to forgive herself along the way.
I didn’t know this before and like the idea: Strayed is a name she chose after divorcing her husband. She didn’t want to keep his, couldn’t go back to hers, and settled on Strayed because it symbolized her identity and the power of her journey.
Reese Witherspoon played Cheryl in the movie and did justice to the intense emotion the book evokes.
The Year of Magical Thinking - Joan Didion
Another book about grief, this memoir is iconic. Joan Didion’s daughter was in the hospital on life support when her husband suffered a massive heart attack and died, and she writes about her experiences over the next year.
I’d never read it because grief is hard, and I didn’t want to immerse myself in someone else’s. When it came out, I had just lost my father and both grandmothers, my mother’s emotional abuse was becoming intolerable without my father to keep her in check, my husband’s alcoholic rages were escalating, and I felt unmoored.
But Al-Anon, which I joined a few years later, taught me I glean comfort from shared experience. I wish I’d picked this up earlier.
Didion so clearly describes the mental confusion, irrational thoughts and behaviors, and obsessive tendencies I’d experienced myself and saw in others. For example, when cleaning out her husband’s closet, she couldn’t bring herself to give away his shoes because he might need them when he came back.
Five years passed before Mom would let us empty Dad’s workshop. His fancy tools were a part of him, and as long as Mom kept it just the way he’d left it, she could believe he’d be back soon. She was so mean it was hard to have any compassion for her; this book helped me to grasp her pain and belatedly give her some grace.
Similarly, when Lisa disappeared and turned up in jail, her daughter gave me clothes to take to her bail hearing. They didn’t let her change, her bail was denied, and I drove around with those clothes in the trunk of my car for months afterward, making one excuse after another as to why I couldn’t return them to her family yet. She didn’t need them, so there was no rush, but what I couldn’t explain, because I knew it didn’t make any sense, was that I found comfort in having a piece of her with me.
Didion has been criticized for name-dropping and privilege, but that didn’t bother me because she was writing about her own life, and that was just how she lived. Being rich and famous didn’t protect her from the raw emotion of common human experience, and she brilliantly portrays the mess and illogic of deep grief.
Educated - Tara Westover
This was a powerful read that will stick with me.
Tara Westover is the youngest of seven children raised by paranoid, isolated, religious fundamentalists who trusted nobody — the government, medical professionals, educators. They never saw the inside of a school or hospital, even for major, life-threatening injuries. But they did visit the library, where Westover and one of her brothers learned to love reading and learning.
Westover’s father was a domineering misogynist who regularly put his children in harm’s way in his scrapping business, and her childhood was harrowing. One of her brothers emotionally and physically abused her, and everyone looked away. Yet her identity was wrapped up in her family, and she maintained a fierce loyalty to them that was tested when she decided to pursue formal education.
Westover faced an impossible choice: stay with her family and lose the education and future she longed for or continue her quest of discovery and lose her family. The title reveals her path, and it’s a remarkable tale.
Westover has been criticized as an unreliable narrator, questioning often whether something happened the way she remembers it, but I understand and can relate to this. When you’re abused and gaslit for years, especially from a young age, you don’t trust your own senses and memories. Her honesty when others remember certain events differently than she does makes her story ring true to me.
It’s hard for me to believe people live the way her family does in 21st-century United States; I know they do, I just don’t understand it, and this was a fascinating glimpse into religious fundamentalism and the survivalist mentality.
Westover overcoming her upbringing to obtain a Ph.D. from Cambridge is a testament to the power of resilience, education, and perseverance.
