Mostly, she stays in the moment she is narrating, avoiding the unspoken, apologetic "had I but known" that can make a memoir feel sketchy and drained of life.
That drive to make sense, to find a deeper meaning in the shallows of daily life, to turn splintered chaos into a coherent story, makes a memoir worth reading.
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"Making an Exit," a memoir by Elinor Fuchs, a drama professor at Yale, explored the conversational patterns of her mother when she was in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's.
Her mother is a co-author of "The Art of Making Dances," a memoir by the choreographer Doris Humphrey (Princeton Book Company, 1991).
What makes a good memoir?
Something that makes a good memoir is a sense of a life lived with gusto.
It would have made a wonderful memoir – about grief and recovery, about learning to love solitude – or a wonderfully human biography of any of the women Bolick discovers in her quest for historical precedent.
But in the end the author is, I think, simply too kind, too respectful; he cannot quite bring himself to send real people into agony (the touching afterword traces the parallels within his own family history, which made me think more and more that this would have made a fascinating memoir).
She is also the author of the book "I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti: A Memoir of Good Food and Bad Boyfriends," which has been adapted into a play, to have its premiere in June at TheaterWorks in Hartford.
