Reviews | August 18, 2021

Four Memoirs

Lisa Katz

Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey. Ecco Press, 2020, 224 pp., $16.99 (paper). 

Terroir: Love, Out of Place by Natasha Sajé. Trinity University Press, 2020, 207 pp., $18.95(paper).

Mouth Full of Seeds by Marcela Sulak. Black Lawrence Press, 2020, 113 pp., $17.95 (paper)

Recollections of My Non-Existence by Rebecca Solnit, Granta, 2020, 244 pp., £16.99(hardcover).

However solitary, memoir reading, like memoir writing, participates in an important form of collective memorialization, providing building blocks to a more fully shared national narrative.—Nancy K. Miller

In in her iconic essay on the memoir genre, “But Enough About Me,” scholar Nancy K. Miller makes an optimistic claim: that the form, often derided as belletristic, has an active social, even political, function. It enables readers to enlarge the national picture in which their own storytakes place. And so, she writes, memoir “may well be the most important narrative mode of our contemporary culture.”

In the books under consideration, the American narrative expands to include women writing from biracial, bisexual, and binational points of view. The authors come  to us from the segregated South; from a combination of East Coast locations and theocratic Salt Lake City; from a winding route that starts in rural Texas and ends in Israel; and from San Francisco as it gentrifies. Their stories reveal a highly variegated way to live as an American woman. Each writer has in common with the others a desire to understand her own provenance and development and, to a degree, to decipher the meaning of her narrative within the larger picture. Race figures in three of these works, religion in a fourth, and gender inequality emerges in all of them.