Growing Up

"Yes, Growing Up . I thought that was a model memoir. I know he was sort of stuck on it for a while, and then he found these letters that his mother had exchanged during the Depression. And there was a lot of reporting in that book. One of my other choices is Joe Lelyveld’s book. That’s even more of a reporter’s memoir. He was twice South Africa correspondent for the New York Times , and won a Pulitzer prize for a book on South Africa. I think if you take somebody like Baker or Lelyveld, who have spent their lives mainly as reporters, they have a different approach to memoir, than someone who has spent her life, say, as a poet. In the first place, they are much more concerned with “Hey, did that really happen or am I just making it happen? Also, it’s establishing place that I often find the most satisfying part of any book. Good mysteries , for instance, I don’t find interesting because of the puzzle of “Who did it?” Really good mystery writers establish a sense of place and Mary Karr did that with The Liars’ Club. And, in the same way, Russell Baker did that with the era he’s writing about in Growing Up . You really felt a time in America from reading that book. Yes, and the years after it. He really gave a sense of the era that you couldn’t get from just a history book. I thought it was a marvelous book. Even so, I still like it. It’s a very wise book. Russell Baker is a very wise man, and I think there are wise observations in that book. His New York Times columns were often humorous, but often serious, and you could tell in the first or second sentence which it was going to be, he was so true to the tone of what he was doing."