Memoirs

          When I first read a memoir, it was a book called Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller and I was fourteen years old.  I just remember thinking that nothing really happened in the book, yet I was enraptured all the same.  I couldn’t put it down.  It made me laugh, it made me cry, and it made me hope.  This confused me.  I was in a stage of life where all I wanted to read was books that had lots of fighting and action and dragons and there I was, reading a book with seemingly no plot whatsoever, and completely falling in love with it.  What I slowly realized was that the reason I was drawn in so strongly is because the power of experience.  The power of listening to someone’s story.

Cheryl Strayed, the author of Wild, which is an excellent book and movie, said that bad memoirs are narcissistic.  They are only for the author.  Good memoirs are for all of us.  This statement perfectly captures what makes a good memoir so enticing and relatable.  Memoirs, good ones, have the uncanny ability to take someone’s experience and making it everyone’s experience.  We, as readers, get to share in someone else’s story.  Some memoirs are about small, trivial things told with whit and charm, while others still are about unbelievable and unforgettable things that seem impossible.  Either way, the best writers are able to tell their story in such a way that reminds all of us of the agency that we have in our own lives.  Whether it is in the small, mundane moments or in the massive, life changing ones, each person has a story.  It is up to us to listen to the stories of others just as much as it is our responsibility to make our story the best that it can be.  Here are some of my favorite memoirs that remind me why life is worth living, and worth living well:

1. Love is a Mixtape: Life and Loss One Song at a Time, by Rob Sheffield

            Rob Sheffield is a writer who is most known for his work in Rolling Stone magazine, but this is the memoir about his relationship with his wife and music.  Each chapter begins with a different mixtape that he made for his wife at various times in their relationship, which he uses as a springboard to discuss love in all its various forms.  Sheffield writes with compassion and conviction as he forces you to fall in love with his wife and music alongside him.  If you find yourself jaded and cynical, that will disappear as you read this delightful tale that will equally crush your soul and compel you to laughter, smiles, and joy.  This book is driven by a perceptive spirit, a hopeful disposition, and an incredible knowledge of music through the generations.

 

2. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou

            This small book is one of the most powerful narratives that I have ever read.  It is the tale of Maya Angelou’s childhood told in such a way that only Angelou is capable of.  If you have never read anything by her before, stop whatever you are doing and go get this book.  Utterly dripping with poetry, this story describes one of the more singular lives of the last century.  Angelou travels from the south to San Francisco and beyond as she catalogues both joys and horrors with a voice that is impossible to forget.  She takes her readers on a visionary journey through the most important parts of her life; all of the good, all of the bad, radiantly connecting the two so as to remind us how love, joy, and hope can ultimately overcome some of the most overwhelming situations.

 

3. Night, by Elie Wiesel

            In the most haunting 100 pages ever written, Wiesel wrote the seminal memoir about life under the Nazi regime and in concentration camps.  Young Elie traces his life from the beginning of the Nazi occupation, being corralled into ghettos, and finally being shipped off to the concentration camps.  Filled with brutal truth and darkness, this is one of those works that you read and never forget because, as disturbing as these details are, we must remember them collectively so that we can keep this sort of violence and insanity from ever happening again.  This is one of the most important books from the 20^th century.

 

4. Through Painted Deserts, by Donald Miller

            Donald Miller is most famous for his book Blue Like Jazz, which is also great and you should read that too, but personally, I liked this one more.  It is, on the surface, a memoir of him driving around the country in a broken down van, but below the surface it is a beautiful look at solitude, solidarity, spirituality, and life in general.  With Miller’s accessible prose and irreverent yet compassionate tone, this book takes you on a journey through the deserts of the American southwest and beyond.  The scenery and the landscape dance off the page, as do numerous life lessons that we’ve all thought before, but never really had the words to describe.

 

5. The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros

            This novella isn’t specifically a memoir in the fact that the title character, Esperanza, is fictional.  However, the stories that she tells are steeped in memory and imbued with experience.  Told through a series of disparate vignettes that seem, at times, more like poetry than prose, this tiny book tells the story of a young girl growing up in inner-city Chicago.  It tells stories about youth, love, family, race, gender, and so much more.  Some are hilarious, some are tragic, some are both, but all of them are beautiful.  Sort of like the mind of a child, this book seems to happen all at once and it is that much more insightful because of how the stories are spun.  Drawing upon her mastery of poetry, Cisneros tells a myriad of stories that all speak the same compassion and hope.  This book is a quick read and a delight, but it will also challenge any reader that picks it up.

 

Gender Studies

            Gender is one of the most complex concepts in human development.  The reason that it can be so convoluted is that it is tied up in so many aspects of a person’s life.  It affects their style, their relationships, their orientation, their job, and the way that they live their life.  A person’s identity is, for better or for worse, inseparably linked to their gender identity.  Now, because of these complexities, it can be a divisive issue with a wide range of arguments that go along with it, running the gamut from parenting to social constructionism to if pink and blue really relate to girls and boys.  I am not here to argue any of these points.  If you’ve ever been to a bar with me, odds are you’ve heard my opinion on all of that stuff (sorry).  The reason that I am writing this is because I know that my perception of gender used to be very myopic.  It wasn’t necessarily that I was ultra-conservative and knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that boys would be boys and girls would be girls and that was that.  It was more the fact that I hadn’t even engaged the topic of gender enough to even formulate that opinion.  I was, for all intensive purposes, uneducated.  I hadn’t taken the time to think critically about a concept that directly affects me and everyone around me day in and day out.  Because of that, I lived a blissfully ignorant life that marginalized people and myself without me even knowing about it.  The problem with naivety is that it can be incredibly damaging and you wouldn’t even be aware of it.

            I believe what started my interest in gender studies was actually my relationship with my mom.  For those who don’t know my mom, she is a total badass.  I was a pastor’s kid growing up, with the notable difference that my mom, not my dad, was the pastor, which I didn’t understand was non-traditional until much later in life; I just accepted it as completely normal.  Nowadays, she runs an international faith-based women’s leadership organization called Lifesprings Ministries (check them out, it’s amazing).  Anyway, I went to college at a private Christian university, which had some good and some bad just like any collegiate experience.  While I was there I learned a lot more than just what I was studying.  Primarily, it wasn’t until college that I realized that I was liberal.  It wasn’t that I was conservative and then changed my opinions.  It was that I genuinely didn’t know that I leaned left politically.  The main catalyst behind this revelation was the fact that I met a lot of Christians who told me that my mom couldn’t have been a pastor because she was a woman.  Upon meeting these people, confused is much too weak of a word to describe my emotions.  Flabbergasted?  Dumbfounded?  Definitely.  But also unbelievably livid.  What do you mean my mom can’t be a pastor?  Like, seriously?  People believe this?  It was at that time that I knew I needed to deconstruct my concepts of gender and figure out how to prove to everyone in the world that my mom is absolutely amazing and the fact that she is a woman is nothing but more empowering for her profession and life.  Naturally, I didn’t know what deconstruction was at that point.  And I thought that I knew what gender was as well, but little did I know how wrong I was.

            The following five books are a select few that really helped me understand what gender is and how it manifests itself in each individual person and in society as a whole.  These are genuinely some of my favorite books in the world simply because they shifted my entire paradigm of what I thought I knew.  Whatever your political persuasion, it is important to analyze concepts and constructs of gender.  Find what you agree with, what you disagree with, but more than anything just be aware.  Be aware that of the weight that gender can hold, and the freedom that it can offer if we all just learn a little bit more.

1. The Purity Myth, by Jessica Valenti

            In The Purity Myth, Valenti breaks down our culture’s obsession with purity, specifically as it applies to young women.  For those who lean right, a fair word of caution, Valenti is very liberal and can be quite caustic (which is why I like her), but aside from this, she makes some incredibly important points about how we oftentimes teach girls to be obsessed with their purity as the end all be all of if they are good people or not.  Valenti posits that this develops a strong rhetoric that tells young girls that their only worth is in their sexuality and virginity.  Which begs the question, if that is your logic, once virginity is gone, what value do you have?  Valenti tackles everything from purity rings, to any analogy involving a lollipop or flower or tissue, to truly shocking things such as fathers virtually “owning” their daughters’ virginity until the day they pass it on to another man.  While Valenti is well known for being one of the most vocal feminists of this age, she is, at the same time, very considerate in her arguments.  She never says, “go be wild and who cares what happens.”  Instead, she redefines purity as it should be, which is a mentality of education, awareness, and putting value in women as people, not just objects of sexual desire.  A must read for anyone who has ever felt damaged by a hyper-sexualization of purity.

 

2. A Year of Biblical Womanhood, by Rachel Held Evans

            First off, I LOVE Rachel Held Evans and every word that she has ever written.  I’d say that’s an unnecessary superlative if it weren’t completely true.  She has written several books and maintains an incredible blog that tackles some of the toughest issues in society today.  This is the book that she is most famous for.  In it, Held-Evans decided to live for an entire year exactly as the Bible says that women should live, including everything from learning how to cook to camping outside while she is on her period.  Initially, this book is absolutely hilarious.  We as readers are welcomed on this journey with Rachel as she narrates her experiences with her characteristic whit and accessibility.  I laughed out loud in public places and people thought I was weird.  Secondarily, and more importantly, Held-Evans manages to put archaic biblical conceptions of womanhood in a modern context.  In this, she denotes an ideology of what it means to be not only a woman, but a better person and Christian in the most empowering way possible: through the truth.

 

3. The Will to Change, by Bell Hooks

            I was first introduced to Hooks through her writings about education, a couple of which I had to read while going through teacher education and others which were given to me by friends.  I then delved into an entire world of Bell Hooks that was amazingly enlightening, and this one was my favorite.  The Will to Change is all about concepts of masculinity as they exist in society and how damaging it can be for men everywhere.  Hooks started off as a die-hard feminist who blamed men for most of the problems in society.  What she realized through her studies, however, was that the patriarchy controls men just as much as it does women.  Men are told to be emotionless, hardened, loveless, and callused, which leaves them with little to no idea as to how to love or emote.  In this book, Hooks tears apart what it means to be a man and offers a way for men to become fully themselves.

 

4. Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, by Michael Kimmel

            If I could force the whole world to read one book, it would be this one.  Seriously, I have three copies and I am constantly lending them out because I want everyone to read it.  Michael Kimmel is essentially the leading scholar on masculinity.  This book analyzes young men from the ages of sixteen to twenty-six and how those formative years determine so much, yet it is also where so many boys get stuck between being a boy and being a man, leaving them in “Guyland.”  Kimmel deconstructs all sorts of social constructions of masculinity going from sports culture, to pornography, to father son relationships and beyond.  In that, he informs so much about horrific problems such as gay-bashing, bullying, abuse, and rape. This book is unbelievably well-researched, drawing upon years of studies, interviews, and analyses.  Somehow, Kimmel manages to be considerate yet relentless as he destroys false notions of masculinity and calls men everywhere not only to be better men, but also better people.  Everyone needs to read this book.

 

5. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

            Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and it was well-deserved.  This is the only book on this list that is fiction, but it is fiction that turns gender on its head.  It is a multi-generational story about the Stephanides family as they go from Asia-Minor to Detroit and beyond.  This narrative is made singularly unique by the fact that the narrator, Callie, is a hermaphrodite.  Due to the unique sexual and gender identity of the narrator, things that are normally mitigating factors in fiction become either ambiguous or obsolete.  This queering of gender in the narration allows the real meaning of this phenomenal novel to stand out.  Themes such love, loss, and family shine brilliantly with one of the most delightful voices of contemporary fiction.  Even if you aren’t interested in gender studies, this is still an amazing book with a beautiful story.

 

Romanticism Part Two: Poetry

As I mentioned in part one of this blog, it would be impossible to separate poetry from Romanticism.  It is as indelible to the genre as the genre itself is to literature as a whole.  Now, yes, this is a blog about books and poetry doesn’t necessarily count as a form of “novel,” however, I’m willing to blur the lines a bit if you are.  I also understand that poetry isn’t for everyone (something that my students remind me of every time I teach poetry in class), but hear me out for a second to at least listen to why it is so awesome.

            The main facet of Romantic poetry that I find enticing is its direct union with nature.  To put it simply, all the best Romantic poets moved to the Lake District (which is essentially the Yosemite of England) and walked around all day until inspiration struck them through a flower or a storm or a tree or what have you and they composed some brilliant piece and then they repeated the process until they died or committed suicide.  One major component of Romanticism was the autonomy of the Poet.  Nothing was more powerful than the imagination of an artist except for the sheer power of nature and the sublime.  As Friedrich Schlegel says in his Philosophical Fragments, “[Poetry] alone is infinite, just as it alone is free; and it recognizes as its first commandment that the will of the poet can tolerate no law above itself.  The romantic kind of poetry is the one on that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.”  So here are a few of my favorite Romantic poets, the most powerful people who ever lived (or so they thought):

Songs of Innocence and Experience, by William Blake

The great thing about William Blake is that he was literally crazy.  He was known to go into his backyard naked with his wife in order to have visions (aka: hallucinations) to fuel his next artistic expression.  The other great thing about Blake was that he was not only a poet, but he was also an artist!  His paintings were singularly unique because of his medium.  What he would do was take his poetry and write it down backwards so that he could inscribe it onto a copper plate and formulate it in a varnish and soak it in an acid bath.  Following that, he would use water color to complete the process.  In this way, no two of his poems were the same and each was as wild as it was a revelation.  I put one of his most famous paintings here, “The Ancient of Days,” for your viewing pleasure.  Feel free to google more if you’re curious.  Blake’s most famous collection of poetry is actually two collections of poetry which are each a direct response to the other.  It is called Songs of Innocence and Experience, respectively.  In these poems, Blake toys with the themes of childlike innocence and hope juxtaposed against the despair and cynicism of a jaded adulthood.  In this, his poetic voice shines as he forces you to question which side of this slightly schizophrenic argument is correct.  Both disturbing and hopeful, these poems will show you the darkness that is in the tunnel of existence, but also point towards the light that shines in the dark. 

 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

            Coleridge had a very sad life that had constant tragedy throughout, which provided us with one of the most famous poems ever written.  The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is an elegiac tale that explores the evil and darkness that exist within all of us.  The basic plot is simple: the mariner is on a ship with his shipmates and an albatross appears, an omen of good luck and prosperity, to guide them through a particularly dangerous part of the ocean.  Following this, the mariner kills the albatross for, ostensibly, no reason whatsoever.  What follows is an exploration of good and evil, life and death, and the humanity that is caught in between those celestial battles.  Told with beautiful imagery and immaculate form, this poem is a must read for anyone who has ever wondered why evil exists in the world and, more disturbingly, why it exists in ourselves.

 

The Complete Poems, John Keats

            John Keats was a doctor out of necessity, but a poet out of passion.  Interestingly enough, out of all the most famous Romantic poets, Keats was born later, but died first at the young age of twenty-five.  In the short time that he lived, he gave us some of the best poetry of the age.  To Keats, the poet and the reader are indistinguishably linked and carry a shared imagination through the communal experience of nature.  This imagination is exactly the thing that he explores through his poetry.  Best known for his Odes, these songs walk the reader through a singular experience at the exact moment that it shoots outwards to the interconnectedness of all phenomena.  In other words, Keats will take something simple, like a nightingale, and use it as a conduit to explain the great truths of life, love, and loss.  His poetry is insightful, compassionate, but most of all, it is simply beautiful.  His words roll of the page and drip into your mind in such a tangible way that you can’t help but fall into the whatever experience he wrote about.  Keats was a true master of language.

 

Rimas y Leyendas, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer

            Bécquer was the king of ghost stories.  Not only are his stories super creepy and wonderful, they are also filled with amazing themes of love, passion, vengeance, and, most of all, regret.  His Rimas y Leyendas is the collection of all of his poetry and most of his short stories.  My favorites include “El Monte de las Animas,” which is the original zombie story.  Complete with unrequited love that results in the dead coming back to life, this story will chill you to your core.  Also, in “Maese Pérez,” Spain’s greatest organist is murdered in a jealous rage, but that doesn’t stop him from playing his haunting tune in the decrepit, hollow cathedral.  In his poetry, he moves through a cycle of emotion that ranges from the highest passion of love, to disillusionment with love, all the way to utter despair and hopelessness.  Throughout all of this, he tells us how the only love worth having is unattainable, but we should go for it anyway.  The heights and depths that he throws his reader through are entirely relatable.  We’ve all felt love like this.  We’ve all hated love like this.  We’ve all felt misery like this.  Bécquer merely gives it the words that we never seem to have to describe it.

 

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce” and “The Rights of Woman”

            One other component to Romanticism that often goes overlooked due to the Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s and other dead, white men is an outpouring of social justice that, previously, hadn’t really existed.  Romantics were among the first to become abolitionists and Mary Wollstonecraft is ubiquitously hailed as the mother of feminism!  Anna Laetita Barbauld came before Wollstonecraft and is best known for these two amazing compositions.  The first, “Epistle to William Wilberforce” came after Wilberforce (one of the most prominent abolitionists of the time) tried, and failed, to bring about abolition in the House of Commons.  His motion was rejected at the time, which resulted in this response by Barbauld to encourage and reignite the cause.  Beautifully written and caustically critical, this poem exhorts the efforts of Wilberforce and reminds him as well as others to keep fighting for what they knew to be right.  On the other hand, it is a harsh indictment of slavery as it existed in England in the 1700s.  Secondly, Barbauld wrote “The Rights of Woman,” which was one of the first overt works of feminism ever published.  Wollstonecraft came after Barbauld and had some valid criticisms of her ideology, however it is clear that Barbauld was one of her inspirations and a precursor to feminism as a movement.  In this poem, hails, “Yes, injured woman, rise, assert thy right!” (ll. 1).  In an age where patriarchy and oppression were even more prominent than they are today, Barbauld had the courage to speak up and fight for the rights of minorities.