Later his leg died.

"[Daddy] had worked in a steel mill for over thirty years and had contracted emphysema. Emphysema and fits. And a brain tumor. He discovered he had a brain tumor during the course of a hospital stay because of the emphysema and the doctors wanted to operate. At first he refused. Nobody cuts my family, he insisted. But my sisters and my brother and I fussed and fussed until he finally agreed to it. They removed a tumor about the size of an orange from his brain and he was up and out of the hospital in a matter of weeks. And just the same. We saw no difference in him.

"Later his leg died. Just shriveled up and turned black and died and the doctors said that they had to amputate it or the death would spread throughout his body. And so he let them cut it off and he got a cane. He would smile and point to the empty place. Yeah, they got my leg but they didn't get me, he would boast."

~~ from Good Woman: Poetry and a Memoir 1969--1980 by Lucille Clifton

the first person from our church to go to college

"A week before we were to move I was to leave for Washington. The church gave a reception for me, the first person from our church to go to college, and everybody brought gifts and laughed and new that I would make good. But I left Howard after two years. Lost my scholarship because I didn't study. I didn't have to, I thought. I didn't have to know about science and geography and things that I didn't want to know. I was a Dahomey woman. And so I came home to a disappointed and confused Mama and Daddy who was furious and defensive and sad."

~~ from Good Woman: Poetry and a Memoir 1969--1980 by Lucille Clifton

America's Bicentennial

Consider a memory from Independence Day, 1976.

this past week's reading

From the June 2026 print a Harper's Magazine, articles I've read include "Tales of Trash: Memoirs of a Garbageman" as well as Kevin Lozano's "Strangers on a Train: The City that Bernie Goetz Made." I've also read Michael Gorra's "Call My Agent" in the June 25 New York Review of Books, several articles from the June 15 print Christian Science Monitor, and the first two short stories from Richard Ford's Sorry for Your Trouble.

Metaphors matter

"Metaphors matter: for human beings metaphors are casual—we function on the metaphors we ourselves fashion. We imagine a world, we create a reality, we bracket a piece of experience, and it becomes acute, hyperreal, dazzling, revealing, enabling, and also blinding, perhaps deadly. Metaphors set us in motion. Metaphors matter."

~~ from Fugitive Days: A Memoir by Bill Ayers

Dad II

"One day my daughter came back from C.'s apartment and told me about a plastic cupcake she'd accidentally flushed down the toilet. She'd been very sad, she explained, but then Daddy had gotten a letter from the cupcake. It was having an adventure at the bottom of the ocean! It was happy down there. Turns out the cupcake was making friends with a seahorse, a starfish, and a shark. It was probably going to send another letter soon."

~~ from Splinters by Leslie Jamison

Dad

"On the days when I dropped our daughter at his apartment, C was usually waiting for us on his stoop. As soon as we reached his block, she would run to him grinning, her tiny feet pattering along the sidewalk. He leaned down to swoop her up, then held her aloft and spun her around. He was delighted to see her. She was delighted to see him."

~~ from Splinters by Leslie Jamison

The Art of Memoir

"Most memoirs fail because of voice. It's not distinct enough to sound alive and compelling. Or there are staunch limits to emotional tone, so it emits a single register. Being too cool or too shrill can ruin the read. The sentences are boring and predictable, or it's so inconsistent you don't know who's speaking or what place they come from. You don't believe or trust the voice. You're not curious about the inner or outer lives of the writer. The author's dead in the water."

~~ from The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr

Los Angeles

"In Los Angeles, it was easier to breathe. It always was. My hometown made me feel at ease in a way no other landscape ever would: the strip malls and cloverleaf freeway exits, the rush of salt wind of the Pacific Coast Highway, the dark silhouettes of palm trees against those startling, smog-brightened sunsets."

~~ from Splinters by Leslie Jamison

Philip Roth wasn't about to lose a minute

 

~~ from I Will Do Better by Charles Bock

Philly

"I knew the meek [ain't] inherit shit."

~~ from "Ganny: Truer Words at a Funeral" by Joseph Earl Thomas

Growing up

"Growing up [Kenneth] slept with Bryan on the bottom bunk. The oldest of the three of us, I slept on the top bunk. Comfortable, plenty of room. Those were the perks. The morning I woke up to get ready for my wedding, the two of them were there, huddled against each other's backs. Bryan was fifteen. I remember one full year he was so fed up sharing a bottom bunk he slept on the floor, making a pallet out of two or three thick blankets. He probably couldn't figure out what took him so long to figure that one out.

"It was like that a lot. We were a family of seven barely making it. Food stamps. Reduced or free school lunches. School shopping once every year in July. Three to four outfits a piece, a pair of shoes, and then nothing until the following July. I side-stepped this a few times by asking for shoes for Christmas. Always Jordans, except the very last pair just before I was married. Those were Shaqs, blue and black. I'll never forget it, because when they got too small for me, my stepdad wore them another four years."

~~ from The Orchard Is Full of Sound by Sheldon Lee Compton

I'm not good enough

"I'm not good enough to work or marry, but I am good enough to write."

~~ Breece D'J Pancake as quoted in The Orchard Is Full of Sound by Sheldon Lee Compton

captured the bat

At first, it served my wife and me as our bedroom. On day two or three, I was hovering in that space between wake and sleep when I suddenly felt something hovering above my head. Resisting the urge to duck under my covers, I mustered all my courage, stood up, ran outside to get my fishing net, came back in, and boldly captured the bat, without waking my wife.

Knife will arrive next spring

Salmon Rushdie will publish a memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. It's due in April of 2024.

The Goodbye

 Remember my dear, remember my dear,

    We've both been here before.

Remember my sweet, close to your death,

    Beyond us lies so much more.

The pain is over, the sadness ended,

    The crippled body gone.

A new one waits, God's next creation,

    Life does go on and on.

So rest my sweet, I'll hold your hand,

    And send you on your way.

I'll see you later, don't wait for me.

    I'll be home at the end of my day.

~~from Becky Jane: Memoir of an Incredible Life by Nick Delmedico

a most glamorous calling

"Raised by a single working mother who hardly had the time or emotional capacity for the youngest of four, my father grew up without much supervision. His older siblings Gayle and David were ten and eleven years old, respectively, and already out of the house by the time he reached elementary school. Ron, who was six years his senior, perpetuated the abuses he'd endured onto my father, boxing him into unconsciousness and slipping him tabs of acid when my father was only nine, just to see what would happen.

"A predictably troubled adolescence followed, culminating in his arrest, rehab, and a handful of relapses thereafter while he worked as an exterminator in his early twenties. It was his fortuitous move abroad that ultimately saved him. If this were my father's memoir, it'd probably be titled The Greatest Used Car Salesman in the World. More than thirty years later, nothing excites him more than talking about his years on the military base, working his way through the ranks of the company in Misawa, Heidelberg, and Seoul. For a man who came from nothing, life as a used car salesman abroad was a most glamorous calling."

~~ from Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner

2022 Nobel Prize for Literature

Do you find it fishy that Salman Rushdie did not win the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature? In fact, the Swedish Academy chose the knitting needle over the knife as their writing utensil, so to speak, if I heard correctly as a radio program discussed Nobel prizewinner Annie Ernaux's memoir of seeking an abortion in France in the early 1960s. It's worth noting, of course, that the decision could have been made well before Rushdie was nearly murdered on stage in a savage attack.

The Cliff Walk

"I told her the truth about myself then: that like a lot of people in this country I had lost my job and all my money and everything else that I'd always believed added up to the promise of a secure life. How I'd had things my own way for so long that when this happened I spent most of two years feeling sorry for myself and looking for somebody to blame. How I took solace from news reports about how hard life had become in America, until I realized that life had always been hard for a lot of people, people I thought I was better than, and that the only thing that had changed was that bad things were finally starting to happen to people like me who had it so good for so long. I told her that the whole time I was putting my family through hard times I knew what was the best thing to do for them and what was the worst thing, and I always chose the worst thing because it was easier."

~~ from The Cliff Walk by Don J. Snyder

Asian American literature

 Consider two recent lists on Asian American experience: here and here.