Omaha Blues

"Again the family was somewhat dysfunctional. For instance, when he was five or six years old, simply because his presence was inconvenient to his parents, who were off pursuing something, he was left for the summer with the maid’s family on a farm of either Jehovah’s Witnesses or Seventh Day Adventists, I can’t remember which. He doesn’t seem to be particularly mad about it. But I told him that if my mother had read that book, she would have said “Jewish People?!? Jewish people leave their child on a farm with 7th Day Adventists? No!” And his father was a rabbi. Though a reformed, and it didn’t sound to me a very religious one, he was a rabbi. The thing that really interested me about that book is that he actually went and checked his memory. It’s a different approach to a memoir. When I wrote the book about my father I didn’t go back and make sure that the family stories were true, which in any case is difficult to do, particularly if you’re not the sort of family that makes the newspapers every day. But what Lelyveld did was to go back and say “I remember this but in fact that couldn’t have been, because that happened… chronologically that must be wrong.” So I thought it was a good approach to memoir, and really markedly different from the way most people would write memoir. He wanted to say, not just, “This is what I remember” but “This is actually true.” Yes it is an interesting story. His book isn’t about any awful sort of poverty or abuse or anything like that, but it is about a family which seems detached from their children. I know Joe Lelyveld. I guess I know, to a varying degree, all these people, some just barely and some fairly well. After reading his book, I felt I understood him better. Which means that there was something which really rang true about it. I think it’s the funniest of these, though there are funny parts in Mary Karr’s book. And I could have named five or ten other memoirs, but these were the first, probably, that came to mind. There’s actually a book that’s just come out on memoir, or on the art of writing memoirs. It’s definitely something that in the States has grown in the last 15-20 years. And then occasionally one of them breaks through, like Angela’s Ashes , which I could have named as well. I love that book. And that book I didn’t read called, Eat, Love, Pray or something. It didn’t sound like my sort of thing. But some of those books have been enormous successes. I’m not sure. I like novels too. It depends on the book. But it’s an interesting form and I guess another thing about it is that people, because they have that stuff in their minds for a long time, they polish it over the years. So they’re often written in a way that you can see the person has given it a lot of thought. There was another one whose name I forget, I think it was The Glass Castle , that I really liked. About this woman who had this awful childhood in West Virginia, and it opens with her in a cab and seeing her mother looking for stuff in a dumpster…"