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.
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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.
In Deni Y. Béchard’s memoir Cures for Hunger, the reader is introduced to the author as a young boy enamored with his father. The author’s father, André, harbors a wild thirst for danger that burrows in his personality and threatens his family. We see this in the opening scene when André takes his children to sit in his truck over railroad tracks. As the train barrels toward the family, André pretends the truck has stalled until the last possible moment. Antics like this one terrify and thrill his children. Then there is the darker side, the sunken eyes and secrets. After the family’s escape from André—and that’s how it felt, kids packed in the car, speeding across the Canadian border in the middle of the night—Béchard blames his mother for taking him away from his father. In the years leading up to his fifteenth birthday, Béchard discovers pieces of André’s criminal record and resolves to move back in with his father. His hope to quench his fascination with André’s past is shadowed by the realization that his father is not the same man he remembers from childhood.
Béchard explores what it means to be in limbo between craving a father’s love and being repulsed by his lifestyle. In his memoir, the author appears troubled, wanting nothing more than a strong patriarchal figure as he picks fights at school and writes dystopian fantasies in his bedroom. But his redeeming qualities are limited. |
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