Editor's Notes
After rereading the selections in this issue’s Essays and Memoirs section (some of them for the third or fourth time), we’re struck by the strong undercurrent of reconciliation that flows through most of them. These essays remind us that reconciliation is necessary, complex, demanding, immensely human work—and often unfinished business. They also show that the personal essay is particularly well suited to carry out that work.
Rec . on . cile, v., 1. to cause to become friendly or peaceable again: to reconcile hostile persons.
Several essays are about reconciling incomplete relationships between daughters and their fathers. Deborah Tall’s laconic reflections in “A Family of Strangers,” for example, seek to lift the veils of multiple secrets that shroud her taciturn father. Eventually she reconciles herself to a hard fact revealed in the essay’s closing line. Elsewhere, Geeta Kothari tries to understand her immigrant father’s roots by traveling to Bombay with him. “If I did not know Bombay,” she realizes, “how could I know my father?” Like Tall, Kothari’s journey of reconciliation yields only partial answers to her question while revealing much more about her own desire—her thirst—to know him than about his inscrutable past in the streets of Bombay. In “A River of Light,” Meredith Hall explores an equally complex reconciliation with an estranged elderly father she barely knows and aches to love. She too is pulled along by a daughter’s compelling question: “What is this sudden deep recognition of so much [about him] I cannot know?” Sometimes, as [End Page ix] in Seymour Kleinberg’s “A Woman No One Wanted,” a story of growing estrangement with another person—in this case a maternal grandmother—becomes a narrative of self-estrangement and eventual reconciliation with one’s own deepest secrets.
Rec . on . cile, v., 2. to bring into agreement or harmony; make compatible or consistent: to reconcile accounts.
Barbara Hurd’s essay “Fine Distinctions,” a natural and social history of the Orford Ness Nature Reserve on England’s Suffolk coast, is a superb work of nature writing. It is also the kind of rare story-telling that joins seemingly incompatible lines of inquiry Hurd makes into myth and natural history, reality and legend, truth and magic, and living fully in the present moment while delving deeply into memory and retrospection. In “What Kind of Children?” Tim Bascom sets out to reconcile an account of a youthful indiscretion lodged like a rock in his memory—a secret a seven-year-old carries with him all his life. Elsewhere, in an example of personal narrative journalism we’d like to see more of at Fourth Genre, J. Malcolm Garcia (“Empty Streets, Missing Children”) never manages to fully reconcile a chilling account of homeless street kids in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, against the easy affluence of America’s suburban children. When Mort Zachter (“The Boy Who Didn’t Like Money”) inherits a fortune from a frugal and unassuming uncle, Zachter also sets out to reconcile conflicting accounts: an uncle toils all his life in semi-poverty and self-sacrifice—“no vacations, no movies, no wives, no home life, just work” seven days a week in a bakery selling day-old bread—and dies a multimillionaire.
Rec . on . cile, v., 3. to compose or settle a quarrel, dispute.
In a riveting account of one of modern medicine’s miracle drugs gone bad, Donna George Storey struggles to do justice to her mother’s death by reconciling the awful truth of what happened to her and the complex, ambivalent facts that carry a jury in an unsuccessful lawsuit Storey brings against a major drug company.
Rec . on . cil . i . a . tion, n., the process of making consistent or compatible. [End Page x]
None of these reconciliations is entirely complete, settled, or finished. But all of them achieve what we are looking for in good personal essay writing. These writers succeed in doing what Vivian Gornick says makes for good memoir in this issue...
