Tell the Story
After struggling with Vidal’s Point to Point Navigation, rereading (yes, I broke my skim-only resolution again) A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas has been pure pleasure. Richard Rogin, Thomas’s husband, was not dead, but seriously, permanently injured. Thomas writes about the five years following his traumatic brain injury from being hit by a car. […]
read moreGore Vidal writes in his 2006 Point to Point Navigation: A Memoir, "I left myself at the end of my first memoir, Palimpsest, in the year 1964, when I was thirty-nine. It is now April 2005." I came upon this "Part 2" of Vidal's memoirs via some list or other of "grief memoirs," and Vidal […]
read moreOn the back jacket, Philip Roth and Mark Doty call David Plante's The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief "wrenching." Their words can't prepare you for the experience of reading this book. In the prologue, David Plante writes, Nikos Stangos died April 16, 2004. We had been loving partners for some forty years. He died […]
read moreLike Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking (my "book 2"), Donald Hall's The Best Day the Worst Day is a writer's memoir of the death of a writer/spouse. Jane Kenyon was ill and treated for leukemia for fifteen months before she died, as opposed to John Gregory Dunne's sudden death from heart failure. […]
read moreI set up some rules for this series of posts: Do not reread books already read. Skim underlined passages only. Skim and blog, skim and blog. Save time for books as yet unread. I promptly broke my rule when I came to the second book on my list: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. […]
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For years I kept secrets in silence. Then, once upon a time, I spoke and wrote them to a handful of people and began to blog anonymously. Today I tell my stories face-to-face, online, and in a memoir coming soon. Telling our stories leads to freedom, empowerment, and growth, for both the teller and the told. Is today your once upon a time, your time to tell your story?
