I’m interested in people.
I love listening to people’s stories. I enjoy hearing folks talk about their life experiences and I’m especially curious about others career paths.
It’s no surprise that I enjoy reading memoirs.
Unlike autobiographies, which have always seemed a bit dry and too detail-driven to me, memoirs are more personal, more intimate.
In a memoir the author has leeway to selectively share memories and write about events. While memoirs may not contain all of the facts and figures of a person’s life, memoirs should give readers insight into the personal lives of the author.
So, perhaps I am standing on shaky ground when a call out a couple of memoirs I recently read for not doing a great job in telling a life story.
I was a bit disappointed in each of the three memoirs I read this summer. While all three started out strong, two of the three really dropped the ball on carrying the story forward into adulthood.
I’ve been thinking about my disappointment and wondering if I had unfair expectations.
Let’s discuss. You can let me know if I might be asking too much of the authors.
Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor
Anna Qu’s memoir, “Made in China,” reads as if it started from a couple of well-written articles. To be honest, it would have been stronger as a series of personal essays rather than a memoir.
The early portion of the memoir covering her childhood, the emotional abuse and neglect she experienced, and the time she was forced to work in her parents sewing factory as a child was engaging.
But once she started writing about her young adult life the memoir fell apart.
I think there might be more to Qu’s story around her time in school and her choice to earn an MFA. How does a child of immigrants who essentially run a sweatshop come to chose the path of earning a masters degree in fine arts? What inspired this? Qu’s memoir doesn’t address this.
Qu includes a brief mention of her time working in a start-up that went bankrupt. She writes about juggling calls from unpaid vendors while frantically searching for a new job as the company slowly dissolves. You can feel the anxiety but this experience gets limited page-time. This left me curious to know more about this time in her life. How did she come to work in a tech start-up? What’s her take on sticking with an employer given her life experience?
Here’s the thing, those topics are part of Qu’s adult life. She didn’t have control over her childhood but these areas, school and work, are experiences she had some choice in. Is it easier to write about experiences where you had limited control? Does it take more gumption to write about your life decisions?
Hooked: How Crafting Saved my Life
Of the three memoirs I read this summer I liked this one the most.
I had no idea who Sutton Foster was before I picked up this book. I’m interested in the arts and how creativity impacts wellbeing and I came to this memoir from that pathway. If, like me, you’re not familiar with Sutton Foster, she’s a Tony award-winning Broadway actress who has also been on a TV series or two.
Foster spends a good portion on her childhood. She has an early interest in theatre and singing and her parents support both her and her brother in this. Her brother also has a career in theatre. She writes candidly about her mother’s growing agoraphobia and the impact this had on the family.
As noted, I really enjoy learning about different professions and hearing about people’s career journeys, plus I like theatre people, so reading about Foster’s life as a theatre actress was what was most interesting to me. Working in theatre is a hustle! And, when you reach a certain level, you know most of the other actors, it’s a small community that is both competitive and supportive. I found this all very interesting!
My one critique of the book is the amount of time devoted to the challenges she went through with pregnancy. Perhaps for a different reader this would be more interesting. Maybe this isn’t a fair critique.
Throughout the memoir Foster talks about crafts, from collages to knitting to baking. She touches on these various creative outlets that have given her a way to stay focused and calm, express herself and stay connected to family traditions. This was quite lovely!
Sunshine Girl: An Unexpected Life
I’ve had a crush on Julianna Margulies since her ER days. I liked serious, hard-working nurse Carol Hathaway. I know George Clooney was on this show, but I watched ER regularly because of Julianna Margulies.
I loved Julianna Margulies even more when she left ER when it was still a top TV show to do theatre. Like I said, I like theatre people.
All of this made Sunshine Girl even more disappointing for me.
As with the other two memoirs, Margulies spends a good portion on her childhood. Her parents, who followed the spiritual philosophy of anthroposophy, divorced when she was young and her mother, a bit of a free-spirit, moved around the New England area in the U.S. and Europe to teach in various schools.
Margulies’ childhood seemed unsettled and maybe a bit chaotic, but not so much so that her early years should take up as large a part of the memoir as they do. I was pretty bored reading this.
Margulies never goes into detail on her start in acting. She attends college at Sarah Lawrence in NY, briefly mentions being in a play or two and then, all of a sudden, she’s in NYC and giving herself a set amount of time to make it as an actress.
What? Why? How did this come to be?
I don’t recall her sharing anything about her love for acting, what inspired her interest in the field or why she headed to NYC to pursue an acting career. This gap in understanding her path to acting left me wanting.
Actually, this pained me.
I told you how much I liked hearing about people’s career paths.
She shares a bit about how she got her start in film, it was in a Steven Seagal movie and Seagal doesn’t come off so great, and her good fortune booking ER.
She addresses her choice to leave ER and the wise words from her father that helped her make that choice.
My dad said, ‘If you got hit by a bus tomorrow, were you living your life truthfully, or were you waiting to get rich?‘
Julianna Margulies, Sunshine Girl
Beyond that Margulies shares very little “gossip” or stories about others in the acting world. The focus is on her experiences and feelings, which I respect. She seems genuine about her interest in acting as opposed to an interest in becoming famous.
Honestly, she seems fairly private and guarded about her life. Which begs the question why she would chose to write a memoir.
So much of the memoir was devoted on her childhood years, which, to me, were not very interesting at all. Is it unfair to expect someone to write more about what they are known for in their memoir, rather than focusing on parts of their life that are not part of the pubic view? Are my expectations different when the memorist is a “celebrity” verse, say a business leader or politician?
Now it’s your turn.
How do you feel about memoirs? Do you read them? What do you hope to read about in a memoir?
The Seventeenth Line 