The Sacred Journey, and: Fierce Attachments (review)

The year my mother died the greatest gift bestowed upon me was Frederick Buechner's The Sacred Journey, which I read repeatedly and carried everywhere. Voiced in the book, among others, are ideas about how relationships evolve even after death, a concept I'd secretly flirted with but hadn't been able to articulate. Two years later, I experienced the same "Aha!" while reading Fierce Attachments. VivianGornick's exploration of her relationship, this time with a living mother, and her ideas about creative work and the development of self were what I needed, spiritually and intellectually, at the time.

As a reader of memoir, I care more for philosophy than narrative. I seek introspection and insights, and I want to be swept into territory I myself am traversing, to be presented with ideas that might be hovering just at the edge of my consciousness. Though written in two different voices, these favorite books are ultimately about finding faith, one in God, the other in self; and both successfully untangle several threads of meaning out of the fabric of humanness, which to me is the true gift of good memoir.

The Sacred Journey, by Frederick Buechner. Harper San Francisco (paper), 1991 reprint edition. 112 pages, $13.00.

Drawing upon Dylan Thomas's phrase "Once below a time," Buechner describes childhood as a place with "no sense of sequence or consequence or measurable time." The book's central event, the loss of his father at age ten, is the one he believes issued in his awareness of time and consciousness, thereby ending his childhood. Reflecting back, Buechner writes: "How they do live on, those giants of our childhood, and how well they manage to take even death in their stride because although death can put an end to them right enough, it can never put an end to our relationship with them." While delving into the themes of time and memory, Buechner wondrously explores the interior and exterior geography of his life. I lived in the Land of Oz, he claims, and the reader follows him from these boyhood books to his actual life in Washington, D.C., where the family lives until his father's sudden death at age 51. His mother then moves the children to Bermuda, where they live "like kings," but after Hitler's invasion of Poland, they move and live like "exiles" in Tryon, North Carolina, until he is sent to a New Jersey boarding school where he kindles his writing passion. Throughout the narrative one can sense the growing reverence of the boy, who ultimately enters the Union Theological Seminary School at age 27.

A theologian and widely published writer, Buechner's prose is poetic, and it seems like an old friend. "I think of my life and the lives of everyone who has ever lived, or who will ever live, as not just journeys through time but as sacred journeys." How could you not love a writer who, even in the book's introduction, is expressing the wish that his story should inspire readers to examine their own? The first of four autobiographical books, the next title is Now and Then.

Fierce Attachments, by Vivian Gornick. Beacon Press (paper), 1997 reprint edition. 204 pages, $15.00.

Vivian Gornick's memoir centers on her close and fiery relationship with a mother, a woman who, one minute, will say to strangers: "This is my daughter. She hates me." And in the next minute, she will turn and say, "What did I do to you, you hate me so?"

The two coexist in a Bronx tenement building with the rest of Gornick's family, who are less relevant than the neighborhood cast of characters. She weathers her mother's repeated utterances, such as that anybody disagreeable is "undeveloped," and her mother's pain after Gornick's father dies. "Her pain became my element, the country in which I lived, the rule beneath which I bowed." At 21, Gornick marries, then divorces in five...