My Parents--An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You

April 15, 2019
Two very different memoirs within the same cover address memory, identity, history, and mortality from different perspectives. Having established himself as a brilliant novelist (The Making of Zombie Wars, 2015, etc.) and memoirist (The Book of My Lives, 2013), MacArthur and Guggenheim fellow Hemon offers a structural challenge in these back-to-back memoirs, where the end of the book finds a fresh beginning, with no direction as to in which order they should be read. In My Parents: An Introduction, the author takes a deep dive into the lives and marriage of his Ukrainian father and Bosnian mother and their lives before and after the devastating war that tore apart their Yugoslavian homeland and drove them to Canada. His father is a storytelling natural who rarely reads and disdains fiction: "I am not going to read made-up stuff only because it's nicely written," he insists. His mother reads voraciously. As chapters illuminate the cultural significance of food, music, literature, and so much else within their extended families, Hemon rebels against both parents, but what he resists most strongly is their aging and the inevitability of their dying. Ultimately, it is a memoir of mortality, of memory, of what endures. This Does Not Belong to You is more of a series of coming-of-age fragments, some rapturously poetic, covering much of the same ground of the family's years before the war but with the focus on the author as a young boy and man rather than on his parents. He struggles to understand what he understands better now, and he feels a sense of loss now over what he experienced then. It provides the seeds for his sense of identity and for his germination as a writer. Eventually, he finds his narrative and shows that there could have been many others. An incisive combination of literature that addresses the function of literature and memories that explore the meaning of memory.

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Starred review from April 29, 2019
MacArthur fellow Hemon (The Lazarus Project) recounts his Bosnian family’s journey from hopeful progress to exile in this richly reflective two-volume memoir. My Parents follows his father and mother as they rose from impoverished rural backgrounds to enjoy the communist “Yugoslav Dream”—good jobs, a nice apartment in Sarajevo and a vacation house—until the 1992 Bosnian war forced them to flee to Canada and start over in their 50s. Hemon sets the tender and often funny story of his quirky parents against the vivid background of their nurturing (though dour and sexist) peasant culture, woven from epic war stories, food rituals, and folk songs. This Does Not Belong to You is an impressionistic, darker-edged sheaf of Hemon’s boyhood memories (after his grandfather’s death, “he was no longer there at all; just, where he used to be, a void”), more about writerly individualism than tribal solidarity. A lonely boy given to writing poetry on toilet paper and compulsively hunting flies (they “rubbed their little legs gleefully while I strived to catch them with a quick forehand”), Hemon weathered bullies and mooned over unattainable girls. Sometimes lively and sensual, sometimes bleakly ruminative, Hemon’s recollections unite his dazzling prose style with a captivating personal narrative. Photos.

Starred review from May 1, 2019
The two-books-in-one format is not the only unusual trait in Hemon's newest, most delving nonfiction work. He also incorporates the complicated histories of Bosnia and Yugoslavia, studded with cultural touchstones, in his ardently precise and analytical portraits of his parents, while in This Does Not Belong to You, he deepens the art of the vignette with sensuous and emotional veracity as he shares scorching moments from his Sarajevo childhood. Hemon's parents are perpetually invested in constructing their lives, habitual industriousness that sustained them after war forced them to flee to Canada in 1993. Hemon vigorously recalls his father's beekeeping and his mother's political convictions, family traditions, favorite foods and music, and his own misadventures as a young athletic, streetwise, poetry-writing rebel, including painful lessons about the abuse of power inflicted on him in that unkind universe. The dynamics between Hemon's tribute to his parents?kin to Richard Ford's Between Them (2017) and Amy Tan's Where the Past Begins (2017)?and his episodic coming-of-age memoir enhance the impact of each as his perspective widens, narrows, and widens again, allowing him to trace the ripple effects of traumatic loss and displacement. Here, too, are bracing candor, gruff tenderness, righteous anger, and political astuteness, all conveyed with Hemon's signature intensity, mordant wit, and creative bite.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2018

Two books in one--and back to back--this volume from MacArthur Fellow Hemon, a National Book Award finalist and multiple National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, effectively sums up the immigrant experience. In "My Parents," Hemon travels with his parents from Bosnia to Canada as they flee the Siege of Sarajevo, offering both intimate family details and broad perspective on a historical moment. "This Does Not Belong to You" looks back to family, friends, and the ravaged beauty of Sarajevo itself.

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