unreliable memoirs
I was convinced I picked this first book up off the memoir/biography table at the bookshop, and despite the author and the first-person protagonist having completely different names read it as such until I’d practically finished, and then felt let down by the discovery that it was fiction. This is completely unjustified, but hard to separate out from my actual impression of the book
Marc Acito, How I paid for college. In the summer of 1983, in Jersey, Edward is planning to audition for Juilliard (as an actor), but mainly killing time with a dramatic friend, the school jock (who wants to act), his (Edward's) girlfriend and a mildly creepy hanger-on, while avoiding his father and his father's new girlfriend. Then, his father refuses to pay for college unless he studies business. Various dodgy schemes ensue, interspersed with various sexual liaisons (same and mixed sex), as all Edward's friends band together to get him the money.
I liked the set-up, but the resolution involves not one but two plot-lines in which unconscious people are stripped and posed for incriminating pornographic photographs, which loses me on the humour front (being more sexual assault) as well as showing a certain lack of creativity. Also, it's hard to get over the fact that Edward's kind of useless - I was reading for resolution of the plot, rather than because I thought he was a great artist who was being cruelly denied his one chance. What struck me as oddly poignant was having scenes in gay clubs in the Village in 1983, with hordes of gay men enjoying themselves - there's no hint at all of HIV/AIDS in the book, but it's hard not to see it as a presence in the background.
Rachel Manija Brown, All the fishes come home to roost. Definitely a memoir. Starts in a very promising fashion, with the eleven year-old narrator reading Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword while her parents argue over how to get from a deserted railway station in India to the place they are supposed to be staying, a holiday break in the hills as opposed to the hot, obscure, town in India where they are living on their guru's ashram (Baba is, inconveniently, dead, but his presence lingers). Rachel is the only child on the ashram for much of her childhood - she's there from age 7 to 12 - and the only Western white child at the archaic Holy Wounds convent school she attends. Books, and reading, thread throughout the memoir, as the only consistent and reliable form of escape/comfort in a very arbitrary world where everything Rachel thinks or experiences tends to be denied by adults with significantly more power.
It's dark and funny, and very good at getting across character in a short space, particularly in dialogue (her paternal grandfather's introductory comment: "The American Communists were very misunderstood."). It's also about trauma, and the powerlessness of childhood, and the stories people tell themselves, as well as the ones they don't ask. I liked it a lot.
Marc Acito, How I paid for college. In the summer of 1983, in Jersey, Edward is planning to audition for Juilliard (as an actor), but mainly killing time with a dramatic friend, the school jock (who wants to act), his (Edward's) girlfriend and a mildly creepy hanger-on, while avoiding his father and his father's new girlfriend. Then, his father refuses to pay for college unless he studies business. Various dodgy schemes ensue, interspersed with various sexual liaisons (same and mixed sex), as all Edward's friends band together to get him the money.
I liked the set-up, but the resolution involves not one but two plot-lines in which unconscious people are stripped and posed for incriminating pornographic photographs, which loses me on the humour front (being more sexual assault) as well as showing a certain lack of creativity. Also, it's hard to get over the fact that Edward's kind of useless - I was reading for resolution of the plot, rather than because I thought he was a great artist who was being cruelly denied his one chance. What struck me as oddly poignant was having scenes in gay clubs in the Village in 1983, with hordes of gay men enjoying themselves - there's no hint at all of HIV/AIDS in the book, but it's hard not to see it as a presence in the background.
Rachel Manija Brown, All the fishes come home to roost. Definitely a memoir. Starts in a very promising fashion, with the eleven year-old narrator reading Robin McKinley's The Blue Sword while her parents argue over how to get from a deserted railway station in India to the place they are supposed to be staying, a holiday break in the hills as opposed to the hot, obscure, town in India where they are living on their guru's ashram (Baba is, inconveniently, dead, but his presence lingers). Rachel is the only child on the ashram for much of her childhood - she's there from age 7 to 12 - and the only Western white child at the archaic Holy Wounds convent school she attends. Books, and reading, thread throughout the memoir, as the only consistent and reliable form of escape/comfort in a very arbitrary world where everything Rachel thinks or experiences tends to be denied by adults with significantly more power.
It's dark and funny, and very good at getting across character in a short space, particularly in dialogue (her paternal grandfather's introductory comment: "The American Communists were very misunderstood."). It's also about trauma, and the powerlessness of childhood, and the stories people tell themselves, as well as the ones they don't ask. I liked it a lot.