Cannonball Read 15

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“I was rudderless and raw, and the worst part was that no one wanted to talk about any of it.”

Dancing at the Pity Party by Tyler Feder

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Dancing at the Pity Party is, as the subtitle states, “a dead mom graphic memoir.” As someone whose dad died when I was a kid, I related a lot to this book and think it’s one of the best depictions I’ve read of the messy, chaotic, complicated process of grief. Feder’s mother is diagnosed with cancer during her first year away at college, and she dies right when she comes home after finals. The narrative covers their relationship growing up, the illness and death of […]

Just Every Trigger Warning Imaginable

I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy

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I am too old to have watched Jeanette McCurdy on Nickelodeon, but I was vaguely aware of her before she started promoting this book. I also follow a lot of eating disorder recovery stuff, so I’d seen her podcast being suggested before this came out and was thus aware that the book was going to deal with her eating disorder a lot. Up front I will say that if you have an eating disorder and/or are in recovery from one, this book is super, super […]

“Is memoir therapy? Or is it vengeance?”

Motherwell by Deborah Orr

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I was very sad to see that Deborah Orr died in 2019 of cancer when I was doing some googling after reading this book. It’s always so strange to be in someone’s point of view reading their memoir and picturing them alive, and then realizing that this is the only book they’ll ever write. Cancer really robs the world of so much infinite potential. Motherwell is Orr’s memoir of growing up in the titular steel mill town of Motherwell during the 60s and 70s. I […]

“My mother had little sense of childhood, and simply saw it as an inconvenient life stage to be got through as quickly as possible.”

Diamonds at the Lost and Found by Sarah Aspinall

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I bought a lot of memoirs on my vacation this summer and realized when I got home how many are about fraught mother-daughter relationships. I guess I’m working through something, or else I just like reading about dramatic psychological family structures. Either way, Diamonds at the Lost and Found fits in the template of the troubled mother and the put-upon daughter who’s dragged in her wake. This book takes a nested narrative format, where Aspinall simultaneously tells the story of her childhood and adolescence being […]

“No one ever believes me when I tell them my uncle Earl owns a museum.”

The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher

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This is very readable and I’m glad I picked it up randomly at Barnes & Noble, but it didn’t live up to my hopes. I enjoyed Paladin’s Grace so much that I figured I’d see how Kingfisher did at horror. The Hollow Places follows Kara as she tries to recover from her recent divorce. She comes back to her small hometown to live with her uncle, who runs the Wonder Museum, full of taxidermy, Bigfoot memorabilia, and a picture of the Pope made of sunflower […]

“…we never stopped longing for time to pass, to release us back into our families – or what remained of them.”

Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life by Rose Tremain

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This is a very good but very sad memoir about Rose Tremain’s emotionally neglectful childhood growing up in post-war England. After her mother and father get divorced, she is sent off at age ten to a boarding school, compounding the neglect she had already faced. Her mother Jane also went through a traumatic abandonment at boarding school and seems to have been incapable of connecting to Tremain and her siblings. Jane is focused on only her own pleasure, as she gets remarried to a wealthy […]



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