Rebecca Spiegel's debut memoir Without Her is subtitled "A Chronicle of Grief and Love," and you feel both in impressive measure. Throughout the book, Spiegel pieces together the events leading up to and following her sister Emily’s decision to take her own life. Grief and love are vulnerable fields to till when someone is disclosing to an audience. However two perhaps even more powerful and more vulnerable themes run through Spiegel's work: regret and blame. Unspoken emotions can weigh the heaviest when working through a tragedy because they aren’t the emotions that we’re supposed to feel: inconsolable sadness, heartwarming memories of the person who’s been lost, an appeal to the senselessness of it all. These are the societally prescribed ways that we should talk about our lost loved ones. What makes Spiegel's narrative unique is how she comes to terms with the emotions that have no useful manual for traversing this kind of loss: How could Emily do this to herself? What if I had done something differently? What if I’d done something differently my whole life? What if I had something to do with Emily’s death? How can I ever be at peace if I never know the answers to these questions? Spiegel's courage to open up to her readers and bring them along in her journey makes for both a compelling read and an impressive examination of the kind of difficult questions that need to be confronted to heal.
0 Comments
Kelle Groom’s memoir-in-essays, How to Live, is a journey that showcases to the reader exactly what the title suggests: how to live. But it’s living through loss, grief, and pain that Groom really tackles most. As Groom moves across the country, we witness her learning this more than we are told explicitly how to do it. The memoir exemplifies how a writer can use their prose to reflect the content of their work. Groom’s often disjointed mindset as she moves around to new places appears physically on the page in the form of short, staccato sentences, some of which are only a word or two long.
If coming-of-age stories are your preference, but you’re looking for a new twist on the genre, then look no further than Arisa White’s latest title Who’s Your Daddy. This poetic memoir presents a modern take on growing up, from adolescence to adulthood. Arisa White’s story told through narrative poems gives readers a taste of living under an unjust set of fathers. But it’s not all doom and gloom as Arisa interjects a style of humor that complements her own sensibilities. Even though readers are meant to view this story through the perspective of a young Black Guyanese girl, anyone who has had an unfavorable relationship with a parental figure can find value in White’s collection.
How can you write a memoir about a day? Authors generally write memoirs about entire lifetimes, not twenty-four hours. And yet, author Sonya Huber set out to record a single day in her life and all that it stood for in her newly released memoir, Supremely Tiny Acts: A Memoir of a Day.
Huber wears many hats—those of an activist, mother, wife, professor, and writer to name just a few. And in a perfect storm of sorts, Huber finds herself needing to balance all of these roles. Huber’s memoir is micro-focused on a single day. While participating in an environmental protest about climate change in Times Square, Huber is arrested. The main day chosen for the memoir, however, is Huber’s day in court following this arrest. On this same day, she finds herself grading her students’ papers (having necessarily canceled class), dealing with her rheumatoid arthritis, trying to calm her own nerves at needing to appear in court all before she is expected back to her hometown in Connecticut to take her teenage son for his driving test.
Author Kazim Ali reminds us that, like layers of sediment in the earth, generations of lives are inscribed within the land around us. In his memoir Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, Ali weaves a detailed meshing of historical events, personal accounts, and his own experiences as he searches for answers to the series of questions that led him to Cross Lake and the Pimicikamak community.
|
Archives
June 2025
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
|
Glassworks is a publication of Rowan University's Master of Arts in Writing 260 Victoria Street • Glassboro, New Jersey 08028 [email protected] |
All Content on this Site (c) 2025 Glassworks
|