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I love how memoir wakes us up and makes us pay attention to the life around us. How thrilling when the life described is ordinary. After all, most of our lives are ordinary most of the time and what could be more universally ordinary than the fact of having a body--the subject of Paul Auster's recent memoir, Winter Journal?To underscore the simple universality of his project, Auster takes the bold step of addressing the entire book to a "you." "Perhaps it is just as well," he says near the beginning, "to put aside your stories for now and try to examine what it has felt like to live inside this body from the first day you can remember being alive until this one."The book is full of wonderful catalogs of things like the scars he has retained, foods he has eaten, and even every house he has ever lived in. With his skills as a novelist, he can grip us with the stories of various harrowing car drives and weave such stories throughout the book. We get the pleasure of watching his development as an artist, as well as the deepening satisfaction of his second marriage to fellow writer Siri Hustvedt (whose memoir "The Shaking Woman" I also recommend). And he doesn't spare himself in the portrait, admitting to his own excessive drinking and smoking and the panic attacks he suffers because he is unable to let emotion out.I was thoroughly satisfied all the way to the end; and if I felt a pang over the fact that I discovered this book because of my own current project to write my own memoir about the history of my body--how unusual my project seemed before I found Auster's--I also found affirmation here for, as I said at the beginning, memoir wakes us up and says, "Pay attention. Your life is worth it."
J'aime cette citation:" Little by little, as you came to know her better in the weeks that followed, you discovered that eye to eye on nearly everything of any importance. Your politics were the same, most of the books you cared about were the same books, and you had familiar attitudes about what you wanted out of life: love, work, and children- with money and possessions far down on the list. Much to your relief, your personalities were nothing alike. She laughed more than you did, she was freer and more outgoing than you were, she was wormer than you were, and yet, all the way down at the bottom, at the nethermost point where you were joined together, you felt that you had met another version of yourself- but one that was more fully evolved than you were, better able to express what you kept bottled up inside you, a saner being. You adored her, and for the first time in your life, the person you adored adored you back. You came from entirely different worlds, a young Lutheran girl from Minnesota and a not so young Jew from New York, but just two and a half months after your chance encounter on February twenty-third thirty years ago, you decided to move in together. Until then, every decision you had made about women had been a wrong decision- but not this one."
This book felt like writing exercises you might do in college, assembled together.
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