The Art of Time in Memoir

November 19, 2007
Respected critic Birkerts has written an insightful appreciation of the memoir form, works that occupy a “growing... place in our literary culture.” Analyzing five ways different writers have chosen to transform their memories into coherent narrative, Birkerts discerns the underlying principle of the memoir form: balancing two perspectives by revisiting significant events in the past to discover a pattern in one's present life. Nabokov, Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are what he calls the “Lyrical Seekers,” who use “sensuous apprehension” to explore the nature of being. Frank Conroy's Stop-Time
is one of the examples of the coming-of-age memoir, as is Birkerts's own My Sky Blue Trades
. Fathers and sons, e.g., Paul Auster, Geoffrey Wolff and Blake Morrison, are distinguished from mothers and daughters, e.g., Jamaica Kincaid and Vivian Gornick. Finally, works by Mary Karr and Lucy Grealy are among those illustrating the category of trauma and memory. The appeal of this slim volume lies in Birkert's graceful prose and lucid analysis. Written for the general reader, it artfully conveys the basics of the craft and will be a particular boon to reading groups.

January 1, 2008
Time in memoir? Most analyses of this maligned literary form revolve around the fact-versus-fiction debate, but sophisticated literary critic Birkerts takes a deeper look, arguing convincingly that the search for patterns and connections is the real pointand gloryof the genre. Drawing on epiphanies experienced both while reading outstanding literary memoirs and while writing his own, My Sky Blue Trades (2002), Birkerts explains why and how literary memoirs bend time, abandoning the chronological for the circular. Furthermore, Birkerts observes, memory itself is nonlinear and unpredictable: one shocking hour can resonate more powerfully than an entire decade. Writing with ardor, erudition, and conviction, he cites memoirs by such masters as Nabokov, Woolf, and Dillard; celebrates the constraint of the actual; explains the difference between sequential events and story; muses over why so many memoirs focus on family struggles and the writers coming-of-age; and defines a subgenre, the traumatic memoir. Birkerts enlightening literary anatomydeepens appreciation for the memoir as it reveals how writers turn the indelible times of their lives into art that is timeless.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)