I Heart Memoir

I just wrote several pages in the journal I keep for my youngest son. I have done this for all three of my kids: kept a baby book for a year and then a monthly journal for as long as there's room in the blank book I buy (usually another year or two). Before you get all impressed, this is it. I don't do hand print art, I don't scrapbook pictures, I don't make treasure boxes of art from each of their school years. I don't craft. I just write. I enjoy the act of writing and the reflection on my children's growth each month. The process, however, gives me great respect for memoirists. I try to find a common thread, a uniting element, or at least some natural transitions, for one month of experiences, for only a few pages. Writers of memoir take years of their lives and hundreds of pages and not only tell what they remember, but tie it all together and make it into a good story. Because the story is really what it's all about, isn't it?

Post Traumatic Church Syndrome: A Memoir of Humor and Healing

Memoir by Reba Riley

Think this sounds, well, traumatic? Take a look at the peacock on the cover. It's not. True, Riley experienced a bit of a break down and left the conservative church/school/job/life she was in. True, she is suffering from an unknown physical ailment for most of the book. She also meets some people who have been truly abused at the hands of the church. But as Riley takes a year of her life to explore other religions and church denominations, she does so with humor (see subtitle), self deprecation, and a huge amount of grace. This reads more like the blog that was its first incarnation, than like a treatise on what's wrong with church today. It's more Glennon Doyle Melton than Rachel Held Evans (bloggers I love). And though I have not left the church I grew up in, I did explore many different churches while in college, and I do have many unanswered questions today about the role and future of the American church. So I resonated with many of her forays into different church groups, especially when she visits an all African American congregation (bless you, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church and your hats and your ban on bathroom breaks).

Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise
Memoir by Ruth Reichl

Today I am making homemade applesauce, which makes me a little proud of myself, and chicken cooked in Campbell's soup, which makes me a little ashamed of myself. Especially considering the amazing recipes and tales of culinary adventures in this book. Reichl was the restaurant critic for the New York Times for a number of years in the 1990's. Early on in her career, she was "made" and ended up wearing a series of disguises in order to eat at restaurants without receiving special treatment. This world, a world of four star restaurants and cutthroat competition and fur wearing patrons and snooty maitre d's, was all new to me but made very real by Reichl's honest take on it. Through the book, she struggles with what her disguises reveal about her own character, as well as a career centered on excess. The amount of seafood and truffles and foie gras she eats is both attractive and appalling (I mean, I'm guessing here. I've never eaten most of those things.) It's a window into both this other world and this woman's soul.