American Lives, Essays, and Memoirs

Marcia Aldrich,. Companion to an Untold Story.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012. 280 Pages, $24.95.

Joy Castro,. Island of Bones: Essays.
Lincoln: University Of Nebraska Press, 2012. 144 Pages, $16.95.

Edwidge Danticat, ed.,. The Best American Essays 2011.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 272 Pages, $14.95.

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher,. Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 168 Pages, $14.95.

Reviewing four new books from some of the country’s premier outlets for literary nonfiction provides a glimpse into the living heart of “writing true” and into the shape-shifting land between essay and memoir inhabited by many writers of nonfiction. Publishers such as the University of Nebraska Press with its American Lives series, and University of Iowa Press with its Sightline series, have established rich collections within the field of nonfiction, clearing space for continual experimentation and cross-fertilization both in form and subject matter. Awards and recognitions such as the Association of Writers and Writing Program’s Prize for Creative Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award also continue to nominate groundbreaking works, and The Best American Essays collection provides a sample of the innovations offered by publications across the country. As a few examples, these book-length collections by Castro, Aldrich, and Fletcher push against the loose boundaries set up by the very definition of “memoir” and “essay”; each of these three authors has composed a book that is more than a collection of essays, different than a memoir, and yet nodding toward memoir in the invitation to take in the scope of the author’s life.

The four books as a whole reveal that the essay—far from being dead—is proliferating wildly into new forms, even mating with memoir, producing offspring that may demand new tools for understanding short literary non-fiction. These books use the essay’s flourishes and intellectual analysis, its circumspection, research, and structural inventiveness, and combine these formal approaches with the vulnerability and meat of a life story essential to memoir.

Marcia Aldrich’s Companion to an Untold Story, published by University of Georgia Press and winner of the 2011 AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction, has no subtitle to frame its contents. This fragmented telling of a friend’s suicide is arranged in alphabetical entries, some as short as two or three lines. This almost-pulverized form signals at first glance that it will be an associative reading experience. Instead, the alphabetical structure—called abecedarian in poetry and evoking the arbitrary transitions contained in style guides and phone books—presents a narrative that resists chronology and establishes an undertone of ceaseless mourning, with many of the sections referencing one another in a loop. Each section presents a piece of the puzzle about why the friend, Joel, kills himself, yet many center on prosaic nouns that reflect the inadequacy of the author’s answers to this question. The overall effect is haunting, and the list of images and entries creates a sense that, like most lasting grief, this story will never end for the narrator. Strange and highly personal details—Joel’s statement about eating a Clementine, what he did with his spare change before he killed himself—give the reader the feeling of standing with the narrator at the edge of Joel’s death and, like the narrator, trying to put the pieces together.

What to call this collection of pieces—and this book as a whole? Sections of it have been published separately, presumably as “essays” or as “flash nonfiction.” The term “essay collection” calls to mind pieces not guided by this degree of overarching scheme. Yet together, the pieces in the collection appear utterly interdependent and also independent of those earlier appearances. This book, then, is much more than a collection of essays. It is not exactly an essayistic memoir, which I think would offer more of the narrator’s own life as touching tangentially on these pieces, as Alison Bechdel offers in her recent graphic memoir, Are You My Mother? Instead, Aldrich stays very focused, creating a whole out of highly linked...