The truth-filled books to turn to when your mind is full of confused, not-so-helpful thoughts.
The Book: Split: A Memoir of Divorce
By Suzanne Finnamore
272 pages; Dutton
Everybody who gets divorced ought to write a memoir about it, as Suzanne Finnamore has done in Split (Dutton), as a service to the rest of us struggling to unravel the mysteries of marriage.
Finnamore's story opens with a bang: her husband downing two martinis and announcing that he's leaving her and their toddler and their stylish house in wealthy Marin County, California.
He swears there is no other woman, though, naturally, there is.
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He's a liar and a smoothy--we all know the type--and he never deepens into a full-blown personality in Finnamore's story. Split is not a thoughtful autopsy of a marriage; it's impassioned and immediate, concerned only with its narrator's swinging moods as she moves through the stages of grief after being dumped. As such, it rises and falls on the sympathy the reader feels for the heroine tied to the railroad tracks. She's a little vain, a little superficial, a little too self-absorbed to really question how she wound up in such a pickle. Yet, for 250 pages, she is also very good company, thanks to a jaunty sense of humor and a lust for life that encompasses pork buns, histrionic gestures, and drunken sprees with her friends.
If I have to choose sides here, I'm buying the TEAM SUZANNE T-shirt.
- Michele Owens
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The Book: MWF Seeking BFF
By Rachel Bertsche
384 pages; Ballantine Books
Available at: Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound
The author of this lighthearted memoir moves to Chicago for her man, and finds herself friendless. Her solution: 52 "girl dates" in as many weeks.
- Karen Holt
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The Book: I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl
By Kelle Groom
256 pages; Free Press
Available at: Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound
At this point, there have been so many memoirs about addiction, you have to wonder if we really need another one. Then along comes a book like Kelle Groom's I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl. Groom's struggle is with alcoholism, but the story behind her disease--the baby she gave up for adoption at age 19 and his subsequent death from leukemia--is so piercing and true that you live the story as much as read it.
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Part of the book's emotional wallop is due to how it's organized--in short, dreamy chapters than skip forward and backward in time, letting you piece together the chronology yourself--and part of it is due to Groom's exquisite, lyrical prose. As she revisits her past, she remembers the time "[her] mother bought me a beautiful blue dress that touched the floor, spilling out in waves." This was the greatest moment of her life, the moment when "everybody turned to see ... which is what a child wants most. It means I'm here." With this slim, extraordinarily moving book, Groom is here again--to her readers, this time--fragile, insightful, sober and in search of some much deserved forgiveness.
- Leigh Newman
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The Book: What It Is
By Lynda Barry
209 pages; Drawn and Quarterly
Available at: Amazon.com | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound
One of the most moving and emotionally direct forms of the whole graphic genre is the memoir--in part because it allows for all kinds of inventive approaches to telling life stories, such as using the drawings to show how people look and feel to the writer (a huge, tall, monstery dad, for example). It also helps to have thoughtful, deeply poignant writing, which is exactly what you'll find in Lynda Barry's What It Is. This memoir of a young artist came out in 2008, but it's the one to start with if you've never read a graphic book before. (Note: Graphic novels can be novels, memoirs, biographies or anything in between.)
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Barry uses text, drawings and even collages to re-create her violent, TV-saturated childhood, describing how she used art as her way out of the trailer park. "We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality," she says. "We create it to be able to stay." Discouraged at every turn by her parents and teachers, she grew into an adult who felt that she had little to say creatively and, further, that she couldn't say that little well enough. That is, until she rediscovered an imaginary game from childhood, one that required her simply to sit very still in the corner of a room and wait for inanimate objects (say, the pattern on the wallpaper) to come "alive" and move. The magic of that moment and of all Barry's self-examinations is that her ideas apply to just about everybody. We've all had those moments when we think we're not good enough or original enough. Her transformation belongs to all of us.
- Leigh Newman
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