Some Memoirs that Get Really Real

Oh, okay, we're actually talking about that! #107

It’s me! Hi! I’m the delinquent newsletter writer, it’s me! HELLO FROM THE OTHER SIIIIIIIIIIDE!

And by that, I mean, I’m on the other side of a work hurdle that, on a yearly basis, leaches all the available words from my emailing fingertips and renders me unable to read anything much less WRITE about it. (Seriously, I read part of one book in February, thassit.)

Could I have used that non-newsletter-writing time to thoughtfully, deliberately consider how I might like to evolve this reading journey we’re collectively undertaking or at least to redesign my Gentle Lamb Ratings? Yes, certainly. Could I have planned, at least, for some big-bang-hurrah of a triumphant return rather than a wandering recap of a personal and professional endeavor that’s uninteresting to fully all of us except a few people on LinkedIn? It does seem like I should have done, yes.

Did I pursue these extraordinary creative measures? I did not! I instead took a 2.5 hour nap and then thought, “you know what we all really need to TALK about, is Jeanette McCurdy’s absolute sweat lodge of a memoir, among other memoirs that really go there even if you weren’t sure you needed to and didn’t necessarily wear the best shoes for the trip.” I’m back, babies! Let’s go!

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If you take away absolutely nothing else, please know that everyone is deceiving you about I’m Glad My Mom Died when they all say it’s “hilarious” and you see this bubblegum cover campiness that looks like a humorous book that’s joking about the title. So read it but BEWARE. This is the absolutely raw memoir of a child actor whose narcissistic mother so totally controlled, and lived through, her child that Jeanette never fully determined where she started and her mother ended. And unfortunately, that resulted in a career and stardom she did not want and an ongoing eating disorder, addictions, and unhealthy relationships, foremost with herself. The title, dear hearts, is not a joke.

OK, so that all sounds really intense and it very much is, but it’s written so thoughtfully, so beautifully, with such candor, specificity, and insight, that it’s a deeply powerful and meaningful reverie about what it means to become, and trust, yourself in the face of so many outside forces telling you otherwise. And okay - yes, there are many touches of dark, wry humor that give some breath between the truly harrowing details. This is the definition of a compelling memoir - you’ll cry, you’ll swoon, your head will pound, your hands will shake, you’ll laugh a little, you’ll feel worn out at the end. Really excellent, if painful.

Read what all these lambs are about HERE.

Okay, if the above memoir sounded compelling, let me hit you with another equally dazzling tale of a woman growing up with a mother whose boundaries were so deeply flawed that she roped her teenage daughter into the knowledge of the mother’s extramarital affair with a family friend. (Are you all thinking, “wait, can we just go back to the trashy book you read and not live our best Sylvia Plath realness? Geez.”)

Wild Game is a memoir I’d not heard about until my friend Jill mentioned it, but now I will never be able to forget it nor the author’s dramatic, impossible, infuriating and mesmerizing mother, Malabar. In many ways it hits on similar beats to I’m Glad My Mom Died in the great love young daughters can feel for their beautiful, bigger than life, all consuming mothers, as well as how quickly that enthralling force can completely hollow out any sense of burgeoning self in these girls. And how the eventual cleaving can be so traumatic.

This also is fascinating from an authorial standpoint in that - Adrienne Brodeur is conveying the story of her mother, and you can tell that the adult author is both repulsed by Malabar’s behavior as well as still besotted with the seductive enchantress her mother is. Really interesting, really both repugnant and riveting. And again, quite skillfully written.

Okay, fine, let’s lighten things up a little with the story of a life devoted to service semi-culminating with a generationally important election and a globally consequential and visible betrayal by one’s husband!

Mkay so I’m not usually a political memoir reader because who actually better to whitewash and inauthentically spin a story into anodyne personal gold than a political aide? And I acknowledge, if you truly hate Hillary Clinton, you probably do not want to read this. But Both/And was a fascinating, substantive, and realllly candid look at Huma Abedin’s life so far, not just within the Clintonsphere but also as someone with identity firmly planted in both her birth country of Saudi Arabia and her adopted country in the US. And of course, she reveals the behind-the-scenes story of her love, shock, and life with Anthony Weiner as a private person forced onto a humiliatingly public stage. So if you’ve ever wondered “why did she stay with him so long?” or “what kind of automaton works on a campaign” or even “she must be an idiot,” you may be surprised by this compassionate, sensitive and smart memoir about faith, about selfhood, about obligation and work ethic, and about womanhood.

Have you read any of these? I need to know your thoughts.

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Very Important Question

Y’all, are we watching Daisy Jones and the Six? If you’ve been around a while, you know that I think the novel is maybe the perfect pop culture read. And I *am* one of those annoying people who thinks the film is never as good as the book and probably I really need to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once first (NO I HAVEN’T SEEN IT.)

boy are those Presley genes strong, no?

On the other hand, if the wardrobe is half as good as I think it could be, and if it’s as cool as Riley Keough seems to be on the red carpet, and if it oozes the kind of 70’s Fleetwood Mac golden Laurel Canyon haziness that it should, then I sort of want to watch it?

Please advise. I breathlessly await your guidance.

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Also Important But More of a Comment Than a Question

• Confession: I went to SF’s City Lights Bookstore recently because indie bookstores are my love language and … like the Beats, it was a little too cool for school pour moi. Literally every staff suggestion was either dystopian, magical realism or about generational trauma as translated from the original Japanese or all three, and I just. Also, there were actual book section designations with words I fully had never heard of, much less could intelligently deduce what would said section would entail. I walked out empty handed. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.

• Another confession: all these links go to Bookshop.org, which also supports indie bookstores but DOES have normal sections so you can just find and read Joan Didion for the first time if you want to, for crying out loud.

• If you hate memoirs, check the archive for a genre more to your liking. And please come back next weekish for mysteries, or fun fiction, or something else to be determined! If you’re new here, hi! And know that every newsletter is something different, so I hope you find something you love to read.

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