Ms. Oates is clearly ambivalent about the whole memoir process and she takes great pains with this book inparticular to say so.
The root of memoir is memory. When memory is cast back decades it is likely to be imprecise as a torn net haphazardly cast that may drag in what is irrelevant as well as miss what is crucial.”
Unlike her A Widow’s Story: A Memoir which was taken from her actual journal entries, this is a group of loosely related works. Many have appeared in different publications and there is a wide variety of material. Stories of her childhood that sparked her interest and imagination in writing and storytelling. The mysteries that adults (and the world at large) are from our child-self point of view. Letters to and from her parents, Fred and Carolina Oates. Poetry. A longer piece about a friend from high school who committed suicide at 18. The first of her contemporaries to die and it was by her own hand. Snippets of memory about a childhood pet, Happy Chicken, that spooled out in a delightful story told from the point of view of the chicken. When one day the chicken goes “missing”, as happens on a farm, Happy Chicken explains:
And once my wings began to beat, I rose into the air, astonished and elated; and the air buffeted and buoyed me, and I flew high above the tallest peak of the old clapboard farmhouse on Transit Road.
Sure, she read and was influenced by Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-glass but she was a voracious reader and Poe, Lovecraft, Superman and Mad Magazine also fed her imagination. As always, I admire and treasure the way Ms. Oates writes, and though I’ve barely made a dent in her oeuvre I can surely see the shadows these things cast. Memory has been a bit of a theme this past week or so, as I was reading this in bits and pieces while reading other things, namely the novel So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood and now, in my mind they are almost companion pieces. Modiano and Oates have a kinship in their distrust of, yet gentle fondness for, memory. It’s been lovely to witness.
