New memoirs ...

ON BEING HUMAN by Jennifer Pastiloff is an inspiring memoir geared to adults and filled with motivational ideas from her well-liked yoga workshops. She conveys her thoughts with a very personal, upbeat tone in almost three dozen chapters with titles like “Rewrite Your Story,” “Doing and Undoing Pain,” “All Very Normal,” and “I Got You.” Pastiloff is nearly deaf but writes about the importance of listening deeply and affirming others. Her chapters do tend to jump around a bit, and the stories of her life experience will likely appeal more to her middle-aged peers, as perhaps summarized best by the Publishers Weekly review: “Readers feeling stuck in their lives will devour this inspiring story of a woman finding her way.”  Her book is subtitled “A Memoir of Waking Up, Living Real, and Listening Hard,” and Pastiloff says, “At the end of my life, when I say one final What have I done?, let my answer be, I have done love.” 

BROKEN PLACES & OUTER SPACES by Nnedi Okorafor is a shorter work, but it, too, “shows that what we think are our limitations have the potential to become our greatest strengths.” In her life story, Okorafor describes how an operation left her paralyzed from the waist down, a challenge that ultimately “ignited … passion for storytelling and the transformative power of the imagination.” BROKEN PLACES & OUTER SPACES garnered starred reviews from Booklist, Library Journal and Publishers Weekly for its award winning (Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy) author. This new title might work quite well as a summer read for students in Creative Writing and/or Senior Writers Seminar, with an added bonus that some takes place in Chicago. Look for a copy on our shelves soon.

Sounds like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

SOUNDS LIKE TITANIC by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman is another new memoir and this one is told by a young woman whose first professional music job involves playing her violin with a small ensemble while a hidden CD actually supplies the music that the audience hears. Hindman chronicles events from a fifty-four city tour of the United States during the early 2000s and a six-city set of concerts in China.  Throughout, Hindman often forges a stronger connection with the reader by using “you” instead of “I.” Near the end, she reflects on duplicity and pretending, saying, “You even fake yourself, zipping your person into the straight-jacket of various pronouns. This allows you to pretend, for a while, that you are not really writing about yourself…” Yet, she does share stories from her youth in Appalachia, mentioning, for example, “another way in which you equate childhood sadness with music, perhaps because equating despair with music, you don’t have to equate it with the faces of your second-grade classmates.”  Hindman does eventually suffer from panic attacks and her comments on both the American psyche and values will offer book groups some interesting springboards for discussion: “You will discover that ‘make it,’ as an expression, emerged in the American vernacular during the Gilded Age. The wealth disparities of that era are reflected in ‘make it,’ which evolved to mean both mere survival (make it through the winter) and wild success involving money, fame and/or acclaim (make it big), forever linking these two vastly different outcomes in the American mind.”  SOUNDS LIKE TITANIC received a starred review from Kirkus.

The Salt Path by Raynor Winn

A recent memoir, THE SALT PATH by debut author Raynor Winn, is one of my favorite books of the year so far.  Set along the Southwest coast of England, THE SALT PATH chronicles the experiences of Winn and her husband, Moth, who were dealt nearly simultaneous blows of losing their home due to a poor investment and a serious health diagnosis.  I honestly think that most people would have retrenched in those circumstances, but the Winns decided to beginning walking the 630 mile South West Coast Path; they “chose to walk and seized the freedom that came with that choice.” Due to their dire financial circumstances, they camped out nearly every night, making finding a suitable piece of ground an almost daily adventure. Food, too, was often scarce and regularly featured inexpensive options like noodles. 

As a reader, part of me wanted to cheer them on and part wanted to scream at these 50-somethings to stop, get some needed health care and conform to expectations. Yet, that sense of rebellion against an unfair fate is what makes this duo’s story so appealing – Winn includes numerous perceptive comments about ageism, the passage of time, homelessness and life choices: “that step, and the next and the next and the next, was the reason and the future.  Each combe climbed out of was a victory, each day survived a reason to live through the next. Each lungful of salt scouring our memories, smoothing their edges, wearing them down. … something in me was changing season, too. I was no longer striving, fighting to change the unchangeable, not clenching in anxiety at the life we’d been unable to hold onto …. A new season had crept into me, a softer season of acceptance.”

An excerpt of this well-done memoir is available from the publisher and The Guardian has run feature articles, also. THE SALT PATH was published earlier in the UK and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award, which recognizes writing by British and Irish authors.  Past winners have included Mark Haddon, Iris Murdoch, and Paul Theroux to name just a few.