Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness (review)

166Fourth Genre performance, next commune, next fix, next lay. That's the path he follows to get to the book's introduction where Coyote recounts attending the wedding ofWhoopi Goldberg and LyIe Trachenberg. Before he even gets to the meat of his narrative, Coyote proves he can drop names with the best of them. What Sleeping Where I Fall goes on to prove is that he has the cachet to be able to do so. Coyote's memoir is an important and disconcerting work that contributes to an understanding of a period of our recent history that is currently being revived by faux tie-dye and psychedelia. For anyone who would prefer to learn from the past rather than simply rerun its sometimes fatal mistakes, Sleeping Where I Fall is an essential read. Reviewed by MarcJ. Sheehan Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness by Robin Hemley Graywolf Press, 1998 336 pages, cloth, $24.95 Robin Hemley's Nola:A Memoir ofFaith, Art, and Madness is more than just a memoir about the life and death ofthe author's brilliant and disturbed sister . It is also a complex, multi-layered portrait ofRobin Hemley himself, as well as ofhis mother as writer and editor. And finally it is the story of how he makes meaning out of his own connections with his difficult, eccentric, and excruciatingly literary family. Hemley weaves his memoir from letters, excerpts from Nola's journals (with his mother's editing included), court documents, his own powerful memories, and pieces of fiction from his mother's and his own writing. In doing so, Nola unites story, essay, letters, and self-declared fictions effortlessly at the crossroads where nonfiction is most controversial: the junction between objective truth and invention. Hemley is acutely aware ofthis issue; in fact, by revealing his own strategy, he convinces us to trust him. "Even a liar wants to persuade you to shake offyour own skepticism" he writes. "And I have to say that perhaps I'm lying here ... I say that not to manipulate you, but so that we may question together how truly or falsely words can ever relate an experience, and to say that it is not only the truth ofan experience that matters, but the telling, the transformation that happens in the telling, the power ofwords to create new experience, a new truth . . ." Patricia Hampl claims that in a nonfiction narrative the "right voice can reveal what it's like to be thinking." In this memoir, Hemley involves himself Book Reviews167 notjust in the telling ofthe life story, but he plumbs its meaning by revealing how he thinks—exploring not one, but several voices that relate this narrative. Hemley introduces his sister's story as though he were solving a mystery, offering clues from imagined scenes in her life, actual conversation, and excerpts from his mother's fiction. In executing this, he deftly borrows from the techniques offiction, but he also builds complexity by adding bits and pieces ofhis sister's memories, and setting these against his own and his mother's memories . He adds veracity by transcribing passages from Nola's memoir, quoting the text as his sister wrote it, but with light strike-overs revealing the cuts his mother made in her first and failed attempt to manage the material. In so doing, Hemley explores the formative relationship between his mother and himself. And as he ruminates about the reasons for the cuts, he carefully unfolds his own thinking about his sister and his connection to her. Couple this inventive method of examination with a sensibility that is deeply reflective and you have a provocative, richly textured memoir; one that will most certainly fascinate readers who are predisposed to Hemley's approach. For those who are looking for a book that displays the full range and possibilities of contemporary nonfiction, Nola is not to be missed. Reviewed by Anne Marie Oomen A portion of this review appeared in ForeWord, July 1998. Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, Life into Literature by Bill Roorbach Story Press, 1998 218 pages, cloth, $17.99 In Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas...