THOMAS LARSON

Here is a list of memoirs I (mostly) recommend. These titles are in addition to the 125 books I list in the back of The Memoir and the Memoirist. Click on the link for either the Amazon page or the author's website.

1. The Tender Land Kathleen Finneran (2000). This is a masterpiece of emotional narrative; it moves between past, present, and future times in the author's memory; and the work embodies the haunting presence of her brother who suicided at fifteen.One of the best memoirs ever written by an American author. Please see my Kindle collection, What Exactly Happened: Four Essays on the Craft of Memoir ($2.99), for an in-depth discussion of the emotional structure of Finneran's memoir.

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2. Battlefield: Farming a Civil War Battleground Peter Svenson (1992). Svenson's history/memoir interweaves two stories: his buying the property to farm and his discovery that it is hallowed Civil War ground.

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3. Stephen Haven's The River Lock: One Boy's Life Along the Mohawk (2008) is a marvelous then-now drama as Haven returns to his boyhood home, Amersterdam, New York, for a three-week visit, there to struggle less with the adolescent he was and more with the man who has changed and who must find out how.

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4. Kay Redfield Jamison's Nothing Was the Same (2009) is an exquisite portrait of her marriage to, and the eventual loss of, her scientist-husband, Richard Wyatt. I was particularly impressed with how she narrated his absence in her life the year after he died.

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5. I think Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine (2008) is a family-systems classic: the Greenbergs (ex-wife, mother, new wife, father, son, brother) are held hostage during the daughter's psychotic breakdown while their attempts to help her point out how nearly impossible it is, without drugs, for loved ones to do anything constructive than to express their own guilt and frustration.

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6. One of the best Americans-in-a-foreign-land memoirs is Tony Cohan's On Mexican Time: A New Life in San Miguel (2001). Cohan and his wife, fleeing L.A., make the naive plunge into purchasing a house in San Miguel, where buyer protections do not exist and all craft and graft is stacked in favor of the seller, especially when his documents are as recondite as his promises. More than a travel guide, Cohan is forgiving and tolerant, the only way to survive as an exile.

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7. A richly intimate and subtly political memoir is Richard Terrill's Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir (1990). Terrill's one year there took place three years before the slaughter of students in Tianneman Square. It's a beautiful book, revealing the hopelessness of the Cultural Revolution's first-born generation whose futures are utterly set and whose despair lies dormat in their stifled selves. Most touching is Terrill's honest struggle with his preternatural individuality in a country that desires and rejects it.

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8. A remarkable hybrid, part-memoir, part true-crime, Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts (2007) is a deft personal and ethical journey into a kind of grieving testimony for her aunt, whom she never knew, but whose 1969 murder has haunted her manic-yet-mum family and, consequently, the author as well. I also highly recommend her other quixotic, aphoristic, hybrid essay-memoir, Bluets (2009). It is a small masterpiece of the hybrid genre. Look for my full-length essay on Bluets here.

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9. No other memoir reads like The Two Kinds of Decay (2008) by Sarah Manguso, in part, because no one went through the blood-poisoning disease and attendant depression that she did in her twenties and which she writes about in this aggressively sparse book. How does she do it? Manguso fuses two styles: very short theme-based yet chronological chapters, unsentimental and wholly self-absorbed, with powerful sentences or short grafs, spaced apart like graves in a cemetery. The effect: each small chunk earns its emotional weight since each feels written with pain and release, deserving of the air above and beneath it.

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10. What an affecting elegy, a marvel of sense-filled descriptive writing, is Ted Kooser's Lights on a Ground of Darkness (2009). This memoir, all the more poignant for its brevity, recalls his mother's family in Guttenberg, Iowa, on the Mississippi River. One by one he looks back on a grandfather, a grandmother, an uncle, and a mother, letting each one live again in the glow of his memory and letting each one die after showing their dutifulness to family—all of it tender and timebending and told in sixty pages.

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    Though I can't know it, I suspect there are no other memoirs that use the I pronoun (the subject is me) as much as Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2008). At least 75% of the piece is I-centered; the rest is "you" (which may as well be I) and some short descriptions of where he runs in Boston and Japan. Still, the work can be engaging with its simple, direct prose of a man who is obsessed with his 10Ks and a yearly marathon. There's a kind of loopy inelegance to the writing. It's hard to figure if that's the uninspired translator at work or if Murakami publishes such first-draft stuff as a matter of course.

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    I wish I could be more positive about Ann Patchett's Truth and Beauty: A Friendship (2005), her hagiography about Lucy Grealy. My problem with the book outdid my interest in its smart scenes and dutiful love for her subject. The book is a one-dimensional biography of a two-dimensionally-rendered person (unlike Grealy's astounding Autobiography of a Face). Patchett falls in love with Grealy, sticks by her through Grealy's operations and addictions, and peaks before Grealy overdoses. End of story. Patchett never changes and neither does Grealy. A precooked relational narrative with so little authorial insight maketh this one un-book-length-worthy.

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