In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Marrying the Personal and the Political
  • Alexis Paige (bio)
Sarah Einstein. Mot: A Memoir
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. 168Pages, Cloth, $24.95.
Debra Monroe, My Unsentimental Education: A Memoir
Athens: University Of Georgia Press, 2015. 265Pages, Cloth, $24.95.
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf, 2014. 160Pages, Paper, $20.00.

Prologue

Afriend leaves in the middle of a reading by a famous white male author at a national writing conference. I’m not sure whether my friend wishes to make a statement or to protect his own time and psyche, or both, but later, when he explains that he’s run out of patience with “quaint stories,” I understand. The writer is technically skilled, but his ideas seem willfully untethered to the shit show swirling around the doomed orb the rest of us call home. The ideas also lack what my grandmother called gravitas. [End Page 189]

The Past Is Prologue

Which is to say, before I indulge more literary (or moral) superiority, that I prefer art that is more than merely beautiful, perhaps even art that is beauty wrested from something not necessarily so—its very hard-won-ness having made the thing beautiful.

My grandmother was the sort of matriarch who assigned homework during the summers I visited her lake camp in western Massachusetts. Amateur pianist, autodidact, drinker, diva, Irish Catholic, and mother of 12, Gram handled however many of us happened to be around with the imperiousness of an infantry commander. Everyone received marching orders, each assignment tailored to his or her interests or deficiencies. Some cousins would help my grandfather set up games of badminton or pickle, some would play cocktail server to a heated game of pitch among my too-many-to-name aunts and uncles, and others formed an assembly line and made sandwiches of Wonder Bread and bologna, which Gram pronounced like the town in Italy.

During my tenth summer, I would walk to the town library every morning and check out books from a list of titles assigned by Gram. While my cousins slathered zinc oxide on each other and played Marco Polo in the shallows of Wickaboag Lake, I sat in a folding chair at the water’s edge and imagined a gimpy Ethan Frome limping through the dreary streets of Starkfield and considered which version of courage was true in A Red Badge of Courage and what Atticus meant when he said it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. Like Atticus, Gram loathed blue jays—“bullies,” she called them—and then I understood the difference—for at school I had always been more mockingbird than blue jay. So you see where my propensity for gravitas comes from and why I have never been any fun at parties.

Chapter 1 Rock, Paper, Scissors: Musings on Class, Gender, and Race

Gram would approve of the books I’m reviewing here: Debra Monroe’s My Unsentimental Education, Sarah Einstein’s Mot, and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. She’d like their style and heft. Each one is a personal navigation of larger categories of class, gender, and race. Each pulls the reader into her own idiosyncratic mind. They exemplify what Judith Barrington calls the mode of [End Page 190] “musing” in creative nonfiction, or what others call reflection—that “innerliness” that Vivian Gornick describes in The Situation and the Story.SoI’m interested in both Gornick’s idea of story as rendered in these pages—“the thing one has come to say”—but also in how each author says it, for while the books are very different in terms of style, each reveals a deep commitment to marrying substance and form.

Chapter 2 An Accidental Climb Out of the Working Class

Fiction writer and memoirist Debra Monroe confronts gender and class by investigating her utterly charming and persistent misfit-ness. Described by Phillip Lopate as a “picaresque memoir,” My Unsentimental Education charts the author’s unlikely ascendance from white, working-class Spooner, Wisconsin—a place of “all-white rural sameness” with “minute status markers like whether someone put...

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