This, she reckons, is the crucial difference between Heartburn and Margaret Cook's slash-and-burn memoir, A Slight And Delicate Creature.
Mr. Domingo's slight but likable stage memoir about his upbringing in Philadelphia is seasoned with samples of classic R&B from the 1970s and early 1980s: the Isley Brothers and Smokey Robinson, Donna Summer and Teddy Pendergrass, the Ohio Players and Earth Wind & Fire.
And although Elsie's "memoir" feels slight, and reads too often like a funny first draft of something more substantial, it does what all good animal novels do – it makes us think about our relationship with the other species we share the planet with.
The responsibilities of fatherhood awaken in Pollack a passion to better his dodgy neighborhood, and this gives his slight though often amusingly cranky memoir some ballast.
If there's a slight hitch to this admirable memoir by an estimable father, it's that "Oddly Normal" is the story of two parents' struggles; yet Mr. Schwartz, ever a devoted dad, is more interested in exploring his son's inner workings than his own.
It's a memoir with only the slightest hints of conflict or struggle, apart from an early scene in which young Lucy is attacked by a flock of geese.
I feel that none of the slight liberties I took in writing my memoir really affect the overall work, but nonetheless, you should know a few things: I am not, in fact, black.
In an unpublished, undated account held in the Archivo Histórico Cinematográfico, she writes: "the memoir introduces a subjective element that allows the author slight errors and oversights". Fictionalization did not stop subsequent critics from lamenting the narration's extreme nationalism.
