| Kerri Miller adds her own favorite memoirs |
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| The Thread's Must Read |
The memoirs the New York Times missed
In early July, the New York Times published a list of the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years. There were some predictable greats on the list: “The Woman Warrior” by Maxine Hong Kingston, “This Boy’s Life” by Tobias Wolff and of course, Mary Karr’s “The Liars' Club” among them. But there were some puzzling omissions and I have two I think the Times editors really missed the boat on!
First — how in the heck was Jeannette Walls “The Glass Castle” left off this list? I mean, listen to this scene from the beginning of the memoir: “I was sitting in a taxi wondering if I had overdressed for the evening, when I looked out the window and saw Mom rooting through a dumpster.”
Walls draws a harrowing portrait of a damaging childhood with both loving and dangerously neglectful parents, who insist — to their kids — that their eccentric family life is romantic and exciting. “Readers will marvel,” Times reviewer Francine Prose writes, “at the intelligence and resilience of the Walls kids. We root for them when they escape, one by one, to New York City ... And we begin to fear for them all over again when their parents follow them to Manhattan ...”
The second memoir the Times inexplicably missed is Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” To this day, when I hear news reporting about the daily lives of Iranians, I think of Nafisi’s account of risking retribution at the hands of the mullahs to create a subversive book club for women in her Tehran apartment.
There, they read and discussed “The Great Gatsby,” Henry James’ “Daisy Miller” and the work of Jane Austen. Nafisi writes as the memoir opens: “In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream. I chose seven of my best and most committed students and invited them to come to my home every Thursday morning to discuss literature.” This is the true definition of reading adventurously!
-Kerri Miller |
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MPR and the Star Tribune are proud to announce the 20th season of Talking Volumes. This season will feature interviews with Alice Hoffman, Saeed Jones, Tim O’Brien, Karen Armstrong, Lindy West and Tracy K. Smith.
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