Review: How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays

To Live, We Must Keep Moving
Review: How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays

Gianna Forgen

Kelle Groom
Memoir-in-Essays
Tupelo Press, pp. 276
Cost: $21.95 (Paperback)

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. 

Upon first glance, the way Groom chooses to write, utilizing those quick sentences, may simply seem part of her nature as a poet. She has authored four poetry collections, so it comes as no surprise that her language is poetic. The essays in this book are full of vivid imagery and a strong, narrative voice; at times, they feel like prose poetry just as much as creative nonfiction. In the first essay, “Emerald City,” we are quickly introduced to this style of writing:

“Emerald is my birthstone–stones in a watch, a necklace from my grandmother. He types our names together because he wants our names closer. He finds us a house in Geneva, a house west of Syracuse, a house one hour east door-to-door in Rome. The snow is coming down. He says, I love you.” (9)

While the way Groom writes is beautifully poetic and clear to imagine, her prose seems to be a choice that speaks to the content and her own mindset during the book’s events just as much as it is a choice to infuse poetry into memoir. Every word, every decision in sentence structure, appears to be a reflection of the narrative voice. Grief can make us feel disjointed; our thoughts come at us in sharp bursts, as if we are unable to stop them. Occasionally, we read few-word descriptions of sights, sounds, and smells. We read half-thoughts in these frequent half sentences, and they serve the writing well.

Just as quickly as we move through sights and thoughts, Groom moves from place to place. Each essay takes us somewhere different than the last, occasionally returning to old locations. She moves around constantly, and the question as to why is ever-present throughout the memoir. In “Billingsgate,” she is moving from her parents’ house in Massachusetts–where she moved a few months prior–to Virginia, and then Connecticut. 

“Between me and Massachusetts were states I couldn’t fathom–deserts and mountains. Feared I’d die on some outcrop of highway. Tipped over…

​My mom couldn’t make sense of all my Tahoe boxes on her porch. Why didn’t I live anywhere? Why didn’t I have a job?” (115)

The answer to why Groom moves around comes, surprisingly and perhaps unknowingly, two essays before “Billingsgate.” In “Second Language,” Groom is teaching English as a second language at an international school in Orlando when she becomes close with one of her students, M, who has dealt closely with grief herself. Groom is taken by advice M’s doctor had given her: that “her only chance for recovery was to go to a place where she would have to learn everything all over again. A place where she didn’t know the language or the customs or the people”(102). Years later, after having lost touch, Groom runs into M, and thinks again of this advice: Go somewhere new. Start over fresh. It is in starting somewhere fresh that she is able to start to recover. 

In moving around the country, Groom begins to learn how to live in the aftermath of her grief. Her writing, through its poetic imagery and fragmented sentences, reflects the mind of a narrator who feels fragmented herself. The shortness of sentences and bluntness of certain words and descriptions work to show us, as the reader, what the mind of this person looks like without having to directly state it. Therefore, we are immersed into the feelings of grief, of constant movement, along with the narrator. The prose becomes the voice, and the voice becomes the prose; they are not dependent on one another, but simply using each other to heighten the emotions and themes of the memoir.

​At the end of the collection, Groom is preparing to move again; now, there is a sense of hope, a sense of preparedness for going into the unknown, this thing we can not see or control.

“I understand that I can not know how to do things. I can ask for help, then do those things…
​
It’s what M taught me in Orlando so long ago: Go to a new land. Learn to ask for what you need. Learn the language. Learn to speak.” (275)

When we are faced with devastating events in our lives, they can seem all-consuming. How to Live is a lesson in just that: how to live in the face of grief, how to keep going despite the hardships. Perhaps our minds will still be made of half-sentences, half-thoughts, but perhaps they will also learn a new language in a new land, and be able to speak it without fear.