A few years ago, it was popular among some literary types to trash the memoir as an art form. They were self-indulgent, self-obsessed and boring, said critics. Go work out your problems with your therapist, they said. In retrospect, perhaps the publishing industry just did what it typically does when it identifies a trend: it glutted the market to the point of ad nauseam. There were just too many new memoirs on the market for a while.
I also wonder if there wasn’t a bit of misogyny brewing beneath the criticism. I haven’t counted, but anecdotally it appears more memoirs are written by women than men. They often tell stories about family life, relationships, sexuality, body image and other topics that critics sometimes marginalize as “women’s stories.”
Whatever the reason, the backlash never diminished my fondness for a well-written memoir. From Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club” and Molly Brodak’s “Bandit” to Roxane Gay’s “Hunger” and Jessica Handler’s “Invisible Sisters,” I love getting under the skin of complex characters and witnessing the world through their eyes. Nothing cultivates empathy like walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.
This spring marks the publication of two excellent new memoirs, both by authors from South Carolina.
Scott Gould’s “Things That Crash, Things That Fly” (Vine Leaves Press, $14.99) brings a male perspective to divorce and the messy aftermath. The author of the novel “Whereabouts” and the short story collection “Strangers to Temptation” begins his memoir as he and his wife prepare for a vacation to Italy with a group of friends. The adventure includes a side trip to the village where her family is from, Serra Pistoiese in Tuscany. But mere days before the journey begins, she informs Gould she wants a divorce and insists he not tell anyone until they return. That includes their traveling companions and her family in Italy. It is an outrageous demand, but one he honors in hopes of changing her mind. Not surprisingly, he does not succeed.
The bulk of “Things That Crash” centers on Gould’s recovery from the divorce. In an act partly devised as revenge, he decides to heal his broken heart back in Serra Pistoiese, where he spends several weeks researching the story of a fighter pilot who crashed and died there during WWII. Complicating his plan is his lack of skill with the Italian language and a bum knee that prompts him to eat painkillers like they’re Tic Tacs. While he’s there, he befriends several townspeople and experiences a number of simple pleasures that help restore his faith in himself.
What makes “Things That Crash” such a delight to read is the combination of Gould’s keen insight into people and his laugh-out-loud sense of humor. For instance, his description of his wife’s relative: “Rensa would enter the room and accost (her husband) with a machine-gun burst of loud Italian and symphony-conductor gesticulations, and I would think, My God, he’s killed someone and she’s found the body in the basement, only to discover she wanted to know what time she should plan dinner.”
About his daughters, he writes: “Combined, the two of them have ample height and a perfectly balanced psyche. Break them apart and they need shoe lifts and Zoloft and a referee. I adore them as a team. I love them solo.”
Considering the fact that the pandemic has grounded recreational travel for the past year, “Things That Crash” has the added bonus of transporting the reader to Tuscany, which is much appreciated these days.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
The other new memoir is J. Nicole Jones’ literary debut “Low Country” (Catapult, $26), which comes out April 13. Jones grew up in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, the progeny of a large, somewhat lawless family of entrepreneurs who own hotels, seafood buffets and miniature golf courses that cater to the tourists who flock to town half the year. Despite the wealth of her grandparents and uncles who lived largely by the beach, Jones’ family lived on a swamp farther inland and struggled to make ends meet.
The heart of the book is Jones’ beloved grandmother, Nana, who dotes on her grandchildren but who is treated poorly by the men in the family, primarily her husband, who was especially cruel.
Much of “Low Country” is comprised of tales from the extended Jones family lore, most of them about men behaving badly. When her great grandfather is diagnosed with cancer, he abandons his wife and takes off for Mexico with his mistress. An uncle who gets caught with a car trunk loaded down with marijuana goes on the run “from the government, drug dealers, the mob, or all three.” Woven throughout the book are the ghost tales, pirate legends, hurricane stories and slave trade accounts that make up the history of this coastal town.
In describing the aftermath of Hurricane Hazel, she writes: “(T)he people of the Low Country prayed hard that morning, and, whether it helped or not, only one fatality was recorded in South Carolina. Hundreds of people from Haiti on up to Toronto had gone to God, drowned in the storm surge and flooding rain, under a high tide brought even higher by a full harvest moon that October.”
With the prose of a poet, Jones paints a vivid picture of an unorthodox life in an unconventional place.
Suzanne Van Atten is a book critic and contributing editor to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. svanatten@ajc.com
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