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unreliable memoirs
Jan. 7th, 2010 11:13 pmI was convinced I picked this first book up off the memoir/biography table at the bookshop, and despite the author and the first-person protagonist having completely different names read it as such until I’d practically finished, and then felt let down by the discovery that it was fiction. This is completely unjustified, but hard to separate out from my actual impression of the book
( Marc Acito, How I paid for college. )
Rachel Manija Brown, All the fishes come home to roost. Definitely a memoir. Starts in a very promising fashion, with the eleven year-old narrator reading Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword while her parents argue over how to get from a deserted railway station in India to the place they are supposed to be staying, a holiday break in the hills as opposed to the hot, obscure, town in India where they are living on their guru's ashram (Baba is, inconveniently, dead, but his presence lingers). Rachel is the only child on the ashram for much of her childhood – she's there from age 7 to 12 – and the only Western white child at the archaic Holy Wounds convent school she attends. Books, and reading, thread throughout the memoir, as the only consistent and reliable form of escape/comfort in a very arbitrary world where everything Rachel thinks or experiences tends to be denied by adults with significantly more power.
It's dark and funny, and very good at getting across character in a short space, particularly in dialogue (her paternal grandfather's introductory comment: "The American Communists were very misunderstood."). It's also about trauma, and the powerlessness of childhood, and the stories people tell themselves, as well as the ones they don't ask. I liked it a lot.
( Marc Acito, How I paid for college. )
Rachel Manija Brown, All the fishes come home to roost. Definitely a memoir. Starts in a very promising fashion, with the eleven year-old narrator reading Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword while her parents argue over how to get from a deserted railway station in India to the place they are supposed to be staying, a holiday break in the hills as opposed to the hot, obscure, town in India where they are living on their guru's ashram (Baba is, inconveniently, dead, but his presence lingers). Rachel is the only child on the ashram for much of her childhood – she's there from age 7 to 12 – and the only Western white child at the archaic Holy Wounds convent school she attends. Books, and reading, thread throughout the memoir, as the only consistent and reliable form of escape/comfort in a very arbitrary world where everything Rachel thinks or experiences tends to be denied by adults with significantly more power.
It's dark and funny, and very good at getting across character in a short space, particularly in dialogue (her paternal grandfather's introductory comment: "The American Communists were very misunderstood."). It's also about trauma, and the powerlessness of childhood, and the stories people tell themselves, as well as the ones they don't ask. I liked it a lot.
