Hungry for the World: A Memoir (review)

Reviews Full-Length Reviews Hungry for the World: A Memoir by Kim Barnes ViUard Books, 2000 241 pages, cloth, $23.00 Toward the end ofher second memoir, Hungryfor the World, Kim Barnes tells a story about one way the Inuit kiU polar bears. They wrap a wolf bone sharpened at both ends in blubber and place it where the bears wiU find it. "The bear eats it and weakens slowly, over miles, over days, the bone twisting and slashing, kiUing from the inside out," Barnes writes. "Shame feels this way, swallowed and sharp, working its way deeper with each move to dislodge the pain, so that finally, we Ue stiU, dying with blood in our mouths. We eat our stories and starve." Her memoir is an effort to dislodge the sharpened bone of shame she has swaUowed in the past and take in the sustenance of a nourishing, fulfiUing present. Kim Barnes wrote in her earfier memoir, In the Wilderness, of her coming -of-age in a Pentecostal family and her struggles alternately to conform to the narrow strictures of her father's faith and to rebel against them. It is a story of the confusing conflicts between desire and duty, self-restraint and self-denial, obedience to a rigid and confining faith, and acceptance of the wisdom ofinstinct and intuition. The struggle to resolve these conflicts ultimately leads the author to strike out on her own, shunned by her father and determined to control her own destiny. It is a candid and satisfying memoir that leaves the reader confident of the narrator's prospects for reconciliation and self-definition. Hungryfor the World reminds us that there are afterlives to coming-of-age stories. The forces that form character are not somehow resolved by the emergence into adulthood and handily regulated ever after; Barnes's second 191 192Fourth Genre memoir portrays a darker aftermath of her upbringing than the first would have led us to expect. At its center is a powerful and disturbing story ofsexual denigration and psychological thraUdom. The man with whom the narrator reenacts her mother's passive dependency on her strong-wiUed and sanctimonious husband is her father's dark opposite, a self-absorbed sadist determined to degrade his submissive girlfriend. To teU this story Barnes reteUs much of the story she told in the first memoir, covering ground more swiftly and with considerable difference in emphasis. This repetition wiU be more troubling to readers ofthe first book than to those who come at the second fresh, but it's difficult to see how this story would work without this background. Barnes rightly sees that these stories are intimately connected; no matter how often a person remakes herself —and by the end of the book Barnes has remade herself once more into an accompfished teacher and writer, a confident wife and mother, a secure and self-aware adult—what she metamorphoses into is strongly influenced by what she is metamorphosing from. Toward the end of the book there is a scene of abusive sex so agonizing to the author that she can only teU it in third person, cannot bring herself to relive it again in first person or allow the reader to relive it through her except from a distance. Though the scene wiU likely disappoint the voyeuristic among her readers, it is disturbing and revealing enough to reactivate the resentment against the "victim memoir" so widespread in some circles in recent years. To me, however, that scene and this book together confirm my feeling that the crusade against the "confessional memoir" arises out ofuncharitable misreadings ofmemoirists' motives. Critics find the confessional memoir crude and commercial but in Hungry for the World Kim Barnes makes clear that self-revelation is a means ofsalvation, ofheafing, of recovery. Ifshe is right about the lethal self-laceration ofswaUowed shame— and, boy she seems on the money to me—then her confessions in this book are a way to free herselffrom its effects and her wiUingness to share this story is not a matter of marketing but part of a shared strategy for survival. Hungryfor the World is a powerful story told by a writer gifted with graceful prose...