LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN

 Joan Didion. LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I MEAN. Random House, 2021. 

Reprints of previously-published articles from the 60s and 70s. Made me realize how completely I have cut off US culture. Martha Stewart. Tony Richardson, Brit. William Randolph Hearst. Robert Mapplethorpe. Vietnam. Nancy Reagan. I did enjoy the piece about Ernest Hemingway. 

THE PIECES WE KEEP

 Kristina McMorris. THE PIECES WE KEEP. Kensington, 2013.

March book club selection. Again, two separate stories, WW II and 2012?, but they do intersect. One theme, what is "blood memory"? How much of the past lives of our ancestors to we experience, through our dreams or though our dreams?  Vivian, an ambassador's daughter, meets Isaac in London. A German. Shares some facts with him. Later, he follows her back to New York, as part of a group of German spies. Their child and grandchild explore the story 60+ years later. 

My one hesitation: a seven-year-old boy takes a book from the school library, vandalizes the book by cutting out pictures that he somehow sees as being linked to his life. Nazi images, and an electric chair. The mother dismisses the non-scientific explanation. 

I did enjoy reading it. 

INVISIBLE BOY: A Memoir of Self-Discovery

Harrison Mooney. INVISIBLE BOY: A Memoir of Self-Discovery. Patrick Crean / HarperCollins, 2022. 

Borrowed from a book club friend. Local story, a Black child adopted into a fundamentalist White Christian family in Abbotsford, 20 minutes down the road. Mooney is a professional writer which was an unexpected treat to read this often sad and disconcerting story. I kept remembering former students at the age Mooney is describing himself and the reactions often seen in adolescents trying to figure out who they are and who they are meant to be, often without help, and, in this case, with a controlling parent seeming to work against the idea of his "finding himself". He describes his "clown" phase and his "joker" seeking laughs to help himself feel visible. 

I enjoyed the local references, the intersections with my own experience in the Fraser Valley (caught in the anti-abortion protest in Abbotsford, visiting Camp Squeah) and the details of church-hopping and different aspects of fundamentalist culture. I was previously unaware of the horrors of home schooling, using American materials, imposing family ideals. I must have confused it with distance education which at least requires that students follow a curriculum. I felt really bad for the boy so desperate to "earn" his mother's love. There was no such thing as "unconditional" or "reject the behaviour, love the child". The disappointment of searching for the birth parents is palpable. My greatest fear, of memoir written by someone too young to see more than his own POV is still there. A sequel will be welcome, after he has parented his own children.