Amazon.com Review
Memoirs constructed around crises can easily spin out of control, free-falling to the level of tearjerking melodrama. Fortunately, most of the 22 pieces in
Survival Stories, including contributions from such noted authors as Jamaica Kincaid and Isabelle Allende, bypass that sticky trap and carve crystalline beauty from raw anger, sorrow, and dread. Christopher Davis, whose work revisits the steps leading up to and away from the murder of his younger brother, finds crisis memoir a "way to transform pain back into love." Surely this is true for other contributors, too. Natalie Kusz retraces months spent in a children's hospital reconstructing her face after being mauled by a dog in Alaska. Her story and her mother's perspective emerge almost lazily in disarming counterpoint to their intensity. Christina Middlebrook tells of the effort she made to slip back into her soul after a bone marrow transplant, burning everything she had in the hospital except the inevitable memories. In an excerpt from
Darkness Visible, William Styron conjures a wraithlike "second self" who watches dispassionately as he carefully wraps and discards his treasured writing notebook, a bow to the numbing depression pushing him toward suicide. Not every tale is dire, but each draws on different losses or hurts that befall us in life and may be of comfort to others walking these roads.
--Francesca Coltrera
From Library Journal
Rhett, a poet who has taught writing workshops at Johns Hopkins, the University of Iowa, and the University of San Francisco, opens with a discussion of how her book grew out of a workshop she teaches at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival on memoir of crisis. The well-written essays by 20 different authors, such as Reynolds Price and Rick Moody, all deal with difficult situations: death, divorce, insanity, serious illness, and traumatic childhoods. Similarly, Gutkind (English, Univ. of Pittsburgh), who edits the literary journal Creative Nonfiction, offers a collection of "survival" stories, though her title is something of a misnomer. Most but not all of the 20 essays treat personal situations that have shaped the lives of the authors. Exceptions are a fine essay by John McPhee, which describes the ordeal of another person?a downed flyer in the Alaskan wilderness; while Carol Kloss's piece on obesity in adults seems out of place in this collection. Gutkind has written an introduction, as well as short prefaces to each essay that tell the reader what to think about the material that follows. Confessional anthologies such as these are a matter of taste. Some readers will find many of the essays brave and inspiring; others will find them undignified and wish the authors had kept their personal troubles private. Recommended for public libraries.?Caroline A. Mitchell, Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
