Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. In this first volume of her two-volume memoir, prize-winning poet Sharon Doubiago writes an extraordinary memoir of growing up in the 1940s and 50s in South Central Los Angeles and the desert mountain town of Ramona. MY FATHER'S LOVE addresses the current controversies of memory and memoir and sets new standards for the genre by adhering to historical records, letters, diaries, interviews, and a drive to know the unfabricated truth, while weaving these, in stunning language and imagery with remembering and reliving. This book attempts to understand her family rooted deep in the history of America, in both its Southern aristocracy and its victims. It looks at the world through the eyes of a child who knows what love is, a girl labeled beautiful, a victim of rape, incest and psychological terrorism, depicting the genesis of an American epic poet. It will change your perspective of the world forever.
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About the Author
Sharon Doubiago's memoir, MY FATHER'S LOVE: PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS A YOUNG GIRL, VOLUME 1 (Wild Ocean Press, 2009), is a finalist in the Northern California Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction, 2010. Volume Two is forthcoming. Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) received the Glenna Luschei Distinguished Poet Award and was a finalist in the Paterson New Jersey Poetry Prize. She has written two dozen books of poetry and prose, most notably the epic poem HARD COUNTRY (West End Press, 1999), the book-length poem South America Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), which was nominated twice for the National Book Award, and the story collections EL NINO (Lost Roads Press, 1989) and The Book of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (Graywolf Press, 1988), which was selected to the Oregon Culture Heritage list: Literary Oregon, 100 Books, 1800-2000. She holds three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry for Psyche Drives the Coast and a California Arts Council Award. She's an online mentor in Creative Writing for the University of Minnesota (Split Rock) and a board member of PEN/Oakland. For two decades she has been writing Son, a memoir about the mother-son relationship, for which she has received two Oregon Institute of Literary Art Fellowships. Her new collection of memoir stories, Why She Loved Him, is circulating. She has published over a hundred essay--from the personal and creative, to the scholarly.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Brilliant Accomplishment,
By
This review is from: My Father's Love, Vol I: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl (Paperback)
Proust took to a cork-lined study to write his life. Sharon Doubiago took to a van, Psyche, which she has lived in and worked from for many years, traveling the length of the West Coast. Along the way she has written 11 books of poetry and two books of stories, one of which, "The Book of Seeing With One's Own Eyes", won an Oregon Book Award and is listed by the Oregon Culture Heritage society as one of the 100 most significant books in Oregon from 1800-2000. Her latest publication, "My Father's Love, Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl", is part one of a two-part literary memoir. It covers her childhood and formative years, and deals unflinchingly with the incest that dominated her childhood and left physical and emotional scars. In Sharon, it led also to an inner life where everything was recorded, lest she and her own reality be swept away. It's all here in My Father's Love-- the culture of Los Angeles in the 1950s, the family history that went back generations to a place where incest was an unspoken but tolerated phenomenon, and the double and triple messages conveyed by family, religion and the culture of Hollywood. It's a rich, complex and compelling narrative that utilizes family documents, letters and diaries, and moves back and forth between Sharon the adult narrator and the voice of the child Sharon, a voice that is stunningly fresh and alive. It's as though Sharon spent her childhood making a movie with her child's heart and eye, and hid it away for safekeeping until now. "My Father's Love" is a groundbreaking work that sheds new light on the nature of memory and forgetting, and on the interplay between culture and the individual psyche.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A nightmarish saga. A gift. An invaluable tool to prevent re-occurrence,
This review is from: My Father's Love, Vol I: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl (Paperback)
With great respect for the honesty and 'givingness' of the author.
The narrative completely dragged me into the crazy and puzzling world of this little girl. It is an invitation to enter the disturbing world in which she was growing up. The historic mentions surrounds readers by her outside world while at the same time pulls them into the inner storm she was trying to understand. She was fighting her own war, trying to survive from drowning in her dangerous environment. All of her 'news spots' are related to either war or some child's tragedy, drawing a parallel to what she was going through. This book is a terrific accomplishment. That she not only survived the constant terror, but moved forward with her life is wonderful, courageous. I like the way she moved in and out of consciousness, and the grandmother's entries. The lineage... American History indeed. A poet, a writer from a way back line of poets and writers. A breath of hope!
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read this book!,
This review is from: My Father's Love, Vol I: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl (Paperback)
'My Father's Love' is an extraordinary and beautiful book. Its primal landscape is so deeply lived and imagined - the author effectively reinhabits the psychic territory of her childhood, articulating the (once inarticulate) child's perspective, positioning the past as a present and living phenomenon - it is a radically poetic approach to writing memoir. Fantasies, dreams, and even unknown factors are accorded the same status as facts, starting with the image of the drowned man before she was born, a fantastic, haunting, completely original far-out thing like a tarot card at the beginning of her life. It speaks a sort of defiant subjectivity, or a generous subjectivity I should say, since she really does the spadework when it comes to researching the objective details and is especially generous to others, including those others who contradict her story. The portrait of her relationship with her mother is completely heartbreaking. The love she feels, the impossibility of the situation, the horrible moment when she stops sewing the dress and the house gets dirty, the episodes of impasse and betrayal. The way she talks about people not talking about things, not being able to talk, not even being able to look at one another for fear of recognition; the pretense of not knowing that what her father was doing was wrong, the dumb blonde act, how like hanging from a precipice by a thread that was, how excruciating, how true! The 'Sharon this, Sharon that' chapter, with its mindnumbing list of criticisms absorbed whole and suddenly regurgitated is a small, disenchanted poem all by itself. But most extraordinary of all is the huge love inscribed at the center of the book, not just love for her family but for the world and, in the best possible way, for herself, as a child, a woman, a body, an imagination, a heart. It is a sort of spiritual document in this respect. For those of us who have similar radioactive memories this will be an essential book, but it is written for anybody who has an ear for and an interest in how expression might be brought to seemingly inexpressible emotional terrain.
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