December 1, 2021
4 Great Memoirs I Rushed To FINALLY Read Before Year’s End
A Womb in the Shape of a Heart, by Joanne Gallant
Joanne Gallant’s A Womb in the Shape of a Heart is a story of motherhood and loss, a motherhood story that didn’t always promise a happy ending either, though Gallant had no inkling of this when she and her husband set out to have a baby. A pediatric nurse, a person who’d always seem in control of her own destiny, the grief and powerlessness of miscarriage and infertility would rock Gallant to her core.
A Womb in the Shape of a Heart is a beautifully woven story of loss and love, Gallant eventually giving birth to her son, but the pregnancy was fraught with anxiety, and the early days of his life were spent in the newborn the intensive care unit.
And it’s just a story so gorgeously crafted, honest and brave in so many ways, a story that encapsulates the experience of so many families but is still considered taboo or shameful. Joanne Gallant shattering that stigma with beautiful prose and such compelling storytelling that will assure so many people that they aren’t alone.
Persephone’s Children, by Rowan McCandless
All right, this book is excellent. Which is remarkable because a collection of “fragments,” you’d think, would be inherently raw and unpolished. Especially when the fragments themselves are so curious in form: the essay as crossword puzzle, as drama script, as quiz, as diagnosis.
Pretty cool, right? A fun gimmick. But challenging to execute…
In her debut collection, however, Rowan McCandless gets it right, each of these pieces so meticulously crafted to tell a story of a difficult childhood, of growing up Black and biracial, of surviving and escaping an abusive marriage. She writes about motherhood, mental health, and living with trauma.
This is a book that’s going to surprise and delight you.
Any Luck At All, by Mary Fairhurst Breen
Any Kind of Luck at All, by Mary Fairhurst Breen, is from one of my favourite literary genres: memoirs by women who’ve seen some shit. She writes about her suburban childhood, her father’s unspeakable mental illness, her burgeoning activist experiences, marrying young and perhaps unwisely, about parenting as her husband’s addictions overtook him, of becoming a single mother, a lesbian, of a career in nonprofits subject to the whims of government funding, of the struggles of finding work as a woman who’s over 50, and of supporting her daughter through her own mental illness and losing her to fentanyl poisoning in March 2020. Breen originally started writing down her stories for her daughters to read, and as a result they are told with such warmth, and are candid, breezy, funny, and wise.
Fuse, by Hollay Ghadery
I enjoyed Hollay Ghadery’s uncomfortable-making, complicated, richly textured collection of essays, a memoir of daughterhood and motherhood, mental illness, eating disorders and biracial identity SO MUCH. Most things are not just one thing or another, but instead both, and neither, and everything at once. In Fuse, Ghadery unapologetically demands the right to have it both ways, to be a messy, conflicted, raging, loving, hungry and full to bursting human
