Memoir: Memory Transformed.

As a fiction writer, creating make believe worlds and characters is my bread and butter. It’s exhilarating and the best part of my job but also a hell of a lot of work.

Memoirs are no less challenging from a physical writing standpoint – any story need to be constructed properly – but the mind blowing part is how unreal REAL lives can be.

A MUST READ

If you haven’t read The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, you’re missing out. Although Walls was a former gossip columnist for MSNBC, this isn’t a campy celebrity tell all, or a tale of addiction recovery. Gritty and incandescent, it tracks a poverty stricken family who shuffle from one dead beat situation to the next in search of stability and self. Fuelled by a father’s pie in the sky vision of building a dream house – the eponymous glass castle – the journey of this dysfunctional family is gut wrenching.

The book is told from Jeannette’s perspective – the second oldest of four children – as they arrive in scrappy, dirt bag American towns and try to normalize. It’s rare for a book to give me the creeps, but the squalor conditions and indifference of the parents to their children was downright frightening. Not surprising, one of the siblings spent time in a mental institution after stabbing her own mother.

THE KICKER

Few of us can claim to have actual homeless parents. Yet, after years of sinking deeper into depression and poverty, that’s what befalls the matriarch and patriarch of this disturbing clan. Although they attempt to move in with one of their children in New York, the kid has the good sense to boot them out into the street. I can’t fathom doing that act to my parents and one particularly chilling passage from this book sticks me with forever: the author riding in a cab in NYC and seeing her own mother root around in the garbage bins littering the street.

RESILIENCE

Fiction or Non-Fiction, the power of any story boils down to its theme. It’s ‘aboutness’. Memoirs allow us to understand, and relate to, the human condition. While our back stories may not be as dramatic as Mrs. Walls’, our own lives contain similar seeds of struggle. The process of transforming the memory of life into story is a unique, personal and satisfying accomplishment. The Glass Castle made me reflect on my own life and the intricate web of relationships and circumstances that have made me who I am. We all endure strife and heartbreak but have the internal capacity for greatness and change.

That theme – one of resilience – turns this ordinary tale of struggle into something extraordinary.

Two thumbs up!

<a target=”_blank” href=”https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006229590X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=006229590X&linkCode=as2&tag=afehsenfeld-20&linkId=d1a32be1561a007768e037f5f0bb0cb7″><img border=”0″ src=”//ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8&MarketPlace=US&ASIN=006229590X&ServiceVersion=20070822&ID=AsinImage&WS=1&Format=_SL250_&tag=afehsenfeld-20″ ></a><img src=”//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=afehsenfeld-20&l=am2&o=1&a=006229590X” width=”1″ height=”1″ border=”0″ alt=”” style=”border:none !important; margin:0px !important;” />