Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, and: Girl, Interrupted, and: The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father, and: The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father (review)

Reviews Reader-to-Reader: Capsule Reviews Mimi Schwartz Favorite books often come to us word of mouth—from a friend over lunch or in the health club saying, "Read this!" with enthusiasm.We do, because the other books they've recommended were good reads; we find ourselves recommending them also. The aim ofthis section is to expand the world of word-of-mouth recommendations by inviting good readers to share their favorite nonfiction books. Memoirs, travel writing, nature writing , essay coUections, biography—whatever is true, insightful, and inspiring ^—are welcome in this section ofmini-reviews ofnew books and favorite oldies stiU in print. Our hope is to keep the best of nonfiction aUve—after their initial newspaper splash—in a quiet, reader-to-reader kind ofway. Alex Johnson In teaching creative nonfiction students how to shape narrative, I say that knowing what to leave out is, ultimately, the most important trick. It seems counter-intuitive to some. Isn't memoir "confessing" rather than artfuUy omitting or rearranging the detaüs ofa life? In many ways, my favorite pubUshed memoirs thematicaUy mirror this paradox. Just as Mary Karr's tide The Liars' Club may be a sly reference to the art ofcraft over confession, the entire question of omission triggers deeper ones about the interplay of memory, imagination, and identity. Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, by Mary McCarthy. Harcourt Brace, 1972. 264 pages, paper, $12.00. OriginaUy pubUshed as eight separate New Yorker portraits, McCarthy's memoir recounts losing both parents in the flu epidemic of 1918. Evoking 214 Book Reviews215 the claustrophobic world of guardians, the memoir chronicles McCarthy's psychic orphanhood. In 1957, she pubUshed the coUection, adding italicized sections teUing what's true or not true in each original portrait. "There are some semi-fictional touches here," she admits at the start of one section. "There are several dubious points," she opens another. As the italicized sections reveal, the memoir's omissions and misrememberings reveal a far more interesting story: the workings of McCarthy's imagination and how memory itself is shaped by its own storyteUing. GiV/, Interrupted, by Susanna Kaysen.Vintage, 1994. 168 pages, paper, $11.00. In Susanna Kaysen's GiV/, Interrupted, childhood—and at times the author herself-—are intentionaUy omitted. Kaysen's memoir chronicles the two years she spent in a ward for teenage girls at McLean Hospital. Crafted as a group portrait ofa mental hospital, the memoir shows how easy it is "to slip into a paraUel universe" ofsanity and insanity. The memoir itself, though, is a paraUel universe offact and fictional technique. Written in a series oftwoto three-page narrative vignettes, most of the portraits are about others. Readers are forced to scavenge for clues about Kaysen's own life from the case file she threads through the memoir. Rewarding detective work. The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father, by Geoffrey Wolff. Vintage, 1990. 275 pages, paper, $13.00. The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search for Her Father, by Mary Gordon. Vintage, 1997. 304 pages, paper, $13.00. The omissions in these memoirs are the subject's rather than the author's. Both memoirs expose con men fathers whose real story as inteUectuaUy gifted, hidden Jews are far more interesting than their invented Ivy League pedigrees. Wolff's black valentine ofa memoir recaUs a father who kept cars taken out for test drives, left IOU's as the "financiaUy inconvenienced" Tooth Fairy, and ended up in prison, but not before the father's stories made his son into a writer. Gordon's memoir is an elegiac meditation on how her own identity was set by a father who died when she was seven. At forty-five, she learned he wasn't an important inteUectual, but a writer for girlie magazines. His omissions forced his daughter to reshape the narrative of her own Ufe. Who was 216Fourth Genre she? StiU the adoring daughter whose success as a writer owed everything to the fiction of her father's Ufe? "What I had trusted as a text to live by," she writes, became "the shedding of ülusion and the taking on of what might be another ülusion, but one ofmy own."A rich...