Review by New York Times Review
there's a certain kind of memoir - call it the hardest kind to write - that sets out not to tell a story but, rather, to tell why a story cannot adequately be told. To even reach this point, the memoirist must decide whether the complications are worth unraveling - or "unpacking," to use the woeful term du jour - at all. The even more woeful outcome for many such authors is that they become the literary equivalent of someone sitting on the floor of an airport desperately trying to reassemble the contents of a suitcase so that it will fit in an overhead compartment. In THE ART OF MISDIAGNOSIS: A Memoir (Beacon Press, $26.95), Gayle Brandeis is maneuvering a Smarte Carte piled so high with luggage she has to squint through the cracks to see where she's going. The book begins in December 2009, after Brandeis's mother, Arlene, hangs herself in a California parking garage. Though Brandeis has a writing and teaching career, a new husband and a brandnew baby as well as teenage children from an earlier marriage, much of her focus is right where it's been since she was a small child: on anticipating and managing her mother's moods and paranoia. Arlene's psychosis is a moving target. She began suffering delusions at age 54, many involving fears of being spied upon or poisoned. But for much longer she's been obsessed with illness, her own as well as her daughters'. Given a misdiagnosis of rheumatic fever as a child, Arlene revels in what she perceives as a legacy of family fragility and seeks out rare diagnoses as if on a vision quest, namely a group of connective tissue disorders called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome and an obscure metabolic disorder called porphyria. Porphyria becomes the go-to explanation for Brandeis's childhood stomach problems, for which Arlene initially chased down a diagnosis of Crohn's disease only to replace it when porphyria proved itself a more exotic alternative. Brandeis embraced these diagnoses accordingly, though deep down she always knew she was faking her illnesses in an effort to please her mother. In a sequence that's by turns heartbreaking and as stupidly hilarious as something from a scatological teen comedy film, Brandeis recollects her struggles with constipation - that is to say her struggles with pretending to be constipated so as to keep up the Crohn's disease ruse. "The longer I went without a 'BM,' the longer I could hold onto my Sick Girl identity, and the more of a quest I could generate for you," Brandeis writes in a passage addressed to her mother. "You seemed a little lost without the constant demands of my illness. ... I started to spritz Love's Baby Soft every time I pooped to mask the smell." When Brandeis finally "traded in the 'sick girl' mantle," her sister Elizabeth picks up right where she leaves off and begins projectile vomiting at the dinner table "like something from 'The Exorcist.' " Elizabeth eventually lands in a hospital with a feeding tube up her nose, but a mere eating disorder is too prosaic for Arlene, who accuses the doctors of trying to kill her daughter. Years later, Arlene files a lawsuit against the doctors, but Elizabeth, summoned home from college for testimony, is still too loyal to her mother to tell the truth and admit she was making herself throw up. "She doesn't want anything to disrupt her own story line," Brandeis writes of Arlene, "the story of herself as the heroic crusader, the warrior martyr of a mother who stood up to the big bad medical establishment and saved her blameless girls." Over the course of 16 years, Brandeis writes, the family entertained explanations for Arlene's delusions that ranged from borderline personality disorder to schizophrenia to mismanaged diabetes to a brain lesion. During much of that time, Arlene was working on a documentary film about her medical journey, one for which she routinely sought out her daughters' help and participation. The film was clearly a vanity project, though Brandeis is careful to give it its due. As such, she incorporates transcripts and scene descriptions into her book, even giving it the same title her mother was using for the film. Borrowing the title works as a homage; not to mention that " The Art of Misdiagnosis" is a terrific title. But the shifts between firstperson narration, film transcripts and letters addressed to her mother cause the book to buckle somewhat under the weight of its own confusions. Brandeis may have finally disrupted her mother's story line, but that's a separate matter from finding her own. If the death at the center of Brandeis's memoir stirred up more emotional detritus than she could possibly sort through in one book, Thomas Mira ? Lopez may have faced the opposite problem. Framed around his father's death following a massive seizure in 2006, the book of RESTING PLACES: A Personal History of Where We Lay the Dead (Counterpoint, $26) is both a grief memoir and a travelogue through the afterlife - at least as it's experienced by those left behind. In a series of 10 linked essays, Mira ? Lopez treks across various landscapes - some real, some psychological - with an eye toward discovering what connects particular places to particular rituals or relics surrounding the dead. At a construction site that once was Tticson's National Cemetery, the author observes, astutely, that a cemetery serves a "civic function" butis more than just functional, in that "it disposes of the dead, yet also provides them a home. It's built of the dead, but also for the living." In Rome, where he was studying at the time his father had the seizure, Mira ? Lopez visits the Catacombs of Priscilla and wonders why he does not immediately return home. "The tour guides told us about the walls," he writes, "the soft volcanic tufa the Romans initially believed bees nested within.... I thought of the rehab ahead, of how my father's body and mind would be permanently changed." Later in the book, another kind of death comes in the form of a friend, or at least a friendly acquaintance, whom the author must distance himself from when he discovers the man to be a raging bigot. Mira ? Lopez, who holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction from the University of Arizona, is a gifted writer. His ear for language and his ability to take ownership of ideas by finding the poetry in them rather than falling into didacticism - "A ghost is a manifestation of guilt," he writes, "a forgiveness demanded, a memory contested" - is the kind of thing that cannot be taught. Nonetheless, "The Book of Resting Places" feels a lot like an M.F.A. thesis project stretched too thin in order to become a book. His father's death having amounted to a rather narrow premise, there is a sense here of the author combing through every experience he's had in recent years in search of thematically relevant material. Not that the impulse to look outward rather than inward isn't laudable. It's refreshing to encounter a young writer who's chosen to do some fieldwork rather than indulging a deep dive into his own limited personal history. But Mira ? Lopez has the kind of talent that can be as much a burden as a blessing. Though it will probably be embraced by graduate school creative writing types, many of whom struggle daily with imposing deep meaning on what is exasperatingly mundane, "The Book of Resting Places" occupies that awkward literary sphere of books that seem on the surface to be more interesting than they actually are. I actually sort of mean that as a compliment. Sure, Mira ? Lopez relies too much on rigged-up profundities and allusions to Greek myth, but the dirty secret of completing a book is sometimes you have to shift your goal from writing a masterpiece to merely pulling things off. To that end, I have to begrudgingly hand it to the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, whose book of micro-memoirs is nothing if not a lesson in Sticking to your aesthetic guns. HEATING & COOLING: 52 MicroMemoirs (Norton, $22.95) contains essays that are sometimes as short as 10 words - "Swapped the rosary on my bedpost for Mardi Gras beads" (that's the whole thing) - but add up to a surprisingly maximalist portrait of a life. Fennelly writes about the tedium of conversations on airplanes, the unshakeability of a Catholic upbringing, the fact that she has an enormous bladder and can go for hours without urinating. In the title essay, Fennelly calls an airconditioning repairman and, told that her ceiling must come down, wrestles with the "numerous subjects of which I'm ignorant." It's meant to be a reckoning with her perception of herself as a feminist but, as she does again and again in this tiny book, she's really just owning up to the fruitlessness of trying to find meaning in every moment. And if the book feels familiar in places ("Mommy Wants a Glass of Chardonnay" is both a title and trope here), it's also a testament to the power of not unpacking at all but instead living out of a very small suitcase. ? Meghan DAUM'S latest book is "The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 21, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Ranging from a single sentence to several pages in length, these micro-memoirs from poet and novelist Fennelly (Unmentionables, 2008; The Tilted World, 2013) delve into her childhood, motherhood, and her life as a writer and as a wife. Fennelly recounts episodes, events, or earned truths that, given her poignant reflection and graceful, often-funny telling, are sure to stop readers in their tracks. In the title piece, a broken air conditioner is cause for some uncomfortable but not unsexy mental inventorying. Kisses, in general, get their own memoir in the form of a list: What's a kiss but two eels grappling in a cave of spit? Best not to overthink it. Stubbornly fixed memories get attention, as do those that have, troublingly, disappeared. Each well-titled (What I Think about When Someone Uses Pussy' as a Synonym for Weak or I Come from a Long Line of Modest Achievers), sentimental, yet saccharine-free, reduced-to-its-essence memoir portrays an author of bold perception, powerful femininity, and candid vulnerability. This deceptively slim, convention-defying collection delivers unerringly generous rewards.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
The subtitle of Mississippi poet laureate Fennelly's memoir provides readers all the explanation they need. Each of the "52 micro-memoirs" range in length from a sentence to several pages, as the author covers motherhood, marriage, childhood, family, writing, her parents, the death of a beloved sister, the quirks of neighbors and friends, aging, her husband, and a multitude of other observations. It may seem incongruous, but Fennelly packs a lot into each short piece, with some lighter in subject matter and others with a sudden punch-in-the-gut feel, weighted with existential exploration. -VERDICT Potent despite their brevity, many of Fennelly's micromemoirs bring hefty topics to the surface; the lack of excessive text allows readers to fill in the gaps. Readers who enjoyed Anne Lamott's memoirs (Bird by Bird; Hallelujah Anyway) will delight in these pieces. [See "Summering Down," ow.ly/rGF330fkneS.]-Rachael Dreyer, Eberly Family Special Collections Lib., Pennsylvania State Univ. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A poet and fiction writer delivers 52 "micro-memoirs"some just one sentence, some a couple of pagesthat offer insight into her life, the lives of loved ones, and the overall human condition.Fennelly (Unmentionables: Poems, 2008, etc.), the former poet laureate of Mississippi, mostly avoids identifying names in the essayswhich were previously published in a variety of venues, including Guernica, the Kenyon Review, and the Oxford Americanbut sometimes it is obvious whom she is referencing or addressing. Five of the essays scattered throughout the slim book carry the title "Married Love" and refer to her husband, novelist Tom Franklin. Other essays refer directly to the author's children or her parents. Irreverence abounds, as evidenced in the acknowledgements, in which Fennelly thanks her mother by name before adding that she "affirms me daily in many loving ways, as she has done from the start, despite noting that This book has a lot of penises, Beth Ann.' " Some of the essays indeed refer to sex but mostly with humor or melancholy. Self-deprecation appears throughout, as well; Fennelly never takes herself too seriously. Other subjects include the author's doubting of Catholicism, the residents of Oxford, Mississippi, where she lives, and her years as a student. The title essay, previously published in the Southern Review, begins with a service call from an HVAC repairman and then touches on a variety of other topics, including poetry, babies, cookies, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Although the concept and structure of the book are experimental, on the whole, the writing is more straightforward, lucidly composed, and often highly evocative. In "A Reckoning of Kisses," she writes, "he placed his beer on the pool's lip, then pulled me into his. I'll wager that, on the scale of kiss-taste, a freshly-smoked Marlboro followed by a swig of Bud in a forbidden pool in the chlorinated dark still ranks pretty high." A sleek, delightful collection. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
