Grace Talusan's Reading List

"Yes. It’s a complicated relationship that the narrator is examining: the relationship with her mother. She calls her mother Mrs Roy, first of all. To quote from the book, she says she has “lost her most enthralling subject.” Already that makes me feel compelled to read the book. As I said, it’s novelistic. We follow the writer from her time as a child, then as a student, and onto becoming a writer. She mentions the different, very important, works that she has written, her life as an activist, but it is her mother, Mrs Roy, that is like the sun that she keeps revolving around. I think this makes a beautiful companion piece to her novel The God of Small Things . To read them both together, I think, would be amazing. Roy calls her mother an enthralling subject, but the book itself is enthralling. We are immersed in this narrator’s life, in a different time and place. We really loved reading about the journey of this writer, her personal and political upheavals—the history of India as lived through one family in one particular time period. There’s a lot about transformation in here. The consequences of what happens when you lose someone as important as your mother, as complicated as that relationship might be, and how afterwards one reconfigures one’s life. It felt like an entertaining, enjoyable and monumental work."

"One of the themes of our shortlist, you’re right, is death and grief. Mother Mary Comes to Me is about grief for a mother, and Memorial Days’ reason for being, the centre point, is the sudden loss of the author’s husband, Tony Horwitz. He was on his own, on a book tour. And what a loss. This was a long marriage of two writers, such an important relationship. There wasn’t an illness, so there was no preparation. They were going about in the prime of their lives, and then this sudden loss. I think readers responded to the suddenness of that. It reminds me of Joan Didion’s book… not Blue Nights … Yes. With Brooks, suddenly there is this loss, and we move through the initial shock of those days. How do you tell your children? How do you physically move and do all the things that one has to do, all the errands and chores of loss. And I was interested in how this memoir maps grief over time and place, from the writer’s home in Martha’s Vineyard, then to a remote island off the coast of Tasmania. She takes us with her on a journey, moving to all these different places as she deals with this huge, sudden absence. Then, also, from interviewing people or from looking at accounts, she puts together what happened on that street in those final moments where her husband was alive, then her husband collapsed and was not alive any more. It’s incredibly moving and intimate to take us along on that journey with her through grief."

"Yes. It’s a really different approach. This is a person well-versed in writing about other people and communities and systems. It was exciting to have her bring that accomplished reporter’s eye to a place she loves, which is her hometown of Urbana, Ohio. I feel lucky to have read it because she brings that skillset to an American town in crisis, and to her relationship to this town and to the people and her family. It all comes together. That’s why I really appreciated this book: that you can have a memoir that is also deeply researched, meticulously reported, and has a big way of thinking about how systems interact. Macy tells her own story about how she had opportunity through a Pell Grant. There were all these things that she could access. She was a paper girl who delivered newspapers, then eventually she wrote for newspapers, and so she took on this economic mobility. Decades later, that’s not what young people are facing. In fact, there’s so much against them. It’s a tragedy. She ends the book writing about an ex-boyfriend that she had, someone she cared about deeply, who ended up a spokesman of anti-immigrant rhetoric. Anti-Haitian in particular. In that area, there was that notion they were eating dogs and cats—he was part of that. He has since passed away. She asks: How does that happen? What are the stories that we tell ourselves that make us believe such horrible lies about each other. Previously she’s written nonfiction, reported books like Dopesick . But this is different, from a very personal perspective. Yes. And this book starts with a death too. Because it was after her mother’s death that she came back to this town and set off on this journey. At the end of the book, there is a call to action. Like: let’s not lose hope, let’s do things. What can we do to change the story? I saw her last night, actually, and she is running for Congress ."

"This is an astonishing book. It’s so moving. I think one cannot read this book without an emotional reaction. One Boxing Day, he has an accident and he wakes utterly changed. He cannot move his limbs, his torso. It’s terrifying. But it is hopeful and it’s also hilarious. He makes jokes, has a sense of humour throughout. It’s funny, and that was very appealing to me. But it’s also incredibly moving and candid. It’s the narrator’s search to find himself and his identity as a writer. He says he had become divorced from himself; that he was altered and unrecognisable to himself, and yet he still wanted to keep writing and telling stories, and so he found a way to do that. This book is a singular, incredible achievement. I wouldn’t say it is enjoyable, but it is important. And there’s an immersiveness—you go deep into his voice and his perspective. So this is a book about loss too: the loss of one’s body. Yet he still has writing, and I know that as long as I can still have writing, my words, there will be some comfort. If I could still have that part of me, then I still have something."

"It’s so different. It’s fragmentary, told not in chapters but in a way that’s unexpected. We jump all over time and place. We’re in different forms. We’re in letters, in emails, we’re taking walks with the narrator as she meets up with people. It opens with a question that the author is asked, and which she asks herself throughout the book, which is: Why do I write? I guess for people who are writers, that’s why it’s so appealing. We people on the NBCC board are interested in the same question. But it is also about loss. The writer is meditating on the loss of her father and sister to suicide. I was deeply engaged in what this writer was doing on the page—how she took fragments and put them together. Because it didn’t feel like a fragmentary reading experience, it felt very cohesive. It came back to the question again and again: Why do I write? Why does anybody write? Why should one right? There is humour, but there’s all kinds of thinking and revealing and considering of what it means to write memoir, and what it means to write about memory and experience. I loved it. I mean, I loved them all. Any one of the books on the shortlist could have won, and I would have been 100% behind it."