Memoirs: Peeking Into Other People's Windows

I will admit to being a bit of a voyeur.  I walk at dusk and sneak peeks into houses with blinds open and lights on.  Nothing creepy is going on; I just want to see how they decorated the living room.  Memoirs are like those lit up houses; these are writers who have purposefully left their lights on and blinds up so I can peek into their lives.

Some of the best books I've ever read or listened to have been memoirs:  Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, Wild by Cheryl Strayed, and Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty to name a few.

This past week I devoured two outstanding new memoirs:  Hunger by Roxane Gay and You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie.  In addition, I listened to We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, by Samantha Irby, an often hilarious counter stretch to all of the grim reality of the other two stories.

I read Hunger in a day.  Gay says in chapter 2 that she will share "the ugliest, weakest, barest parts of [herself]" (5), and she does.  While exposing and analyzing her own past and present trauma, she also speaks to any woman (or person, really) who has felt that they are not meeting expectations, are not fitting into spaces, are not welcome to a full place in the world.  I could've written the chapter where she talks about starting "each day with the best of intentions for living a better, healthier life" and then when the day is done facing "myself and all the ways I have failed.  Most days I haven't exercised.  I haven't made any of the good choices I intended to make when the day began" (159).  Gay's writing is poetic and brutally true.  Hunger addresses the hunger that "is in the mind and the body and the heart and the soul" (193), and it is a book I am going to revisit many times to mine for wisdom.

You Don't Have to Say You Love Me by Sherman Alexie is a quilt of words.

 Alexie's mother, the woman he is trying to understand in this text, made quilts, and Alexie purposefully designed the 78 essays and 78 poems of this book to come together in the same beautiful, personal, but also random way that quilts do.  The past and the present, the urban and the reservation parts of Alexie's life, the grief and celebration of all his family has lived through, the mania and depression of the bipolar disorder he and his mother suffer from, the modern and native culture, the love and hate  -- these are the quilt squares he sews together to make his art. As he explores his own life, he comes to strikingly simple and beautiful truths:  "Jesus, I thought, is there a better and more succinct definition of grief than it hurts a little to breathe, but we're okay" (241) he observes as he talks to his sister who's living through a wicked forest fire on the reservation.  As he ponders his mortality, he writes:  "I will eventually look at a blank piece of paper/Or blank computer screen and realize that I've run out/Of words.  I will smile, shed a tear, walk outside,/Sit on my porch, and misidentify the local birds" (379). He recognizes that his mother, like all of our mothers, "will always haunt [us]" (199).  His words and style and honesty are beautiful and resonant.

To lighten up a bit, I picked up We Are Never Meeting In Real Life by Samantha Irby as an audiobook.  She is so profane and so crude, but so hilarious!  If you can find it, look up the story where Irby describes her hellcat named Helen Keller.  I looked like a complete loon as I walked down the street laughing so hard I was crying as I listened to her recite Helen's escapades.

I'm so grateful that people like Gay, Alexie, and Irby open up their blinds and let us all peek in to their houses.  Through the glimpses I get into their living rooms, I can better see how I -- none of us -- are alone in our own spaces.