BOOKS DISCUSSSED IN THIS ESSAY:

The Language of Baklava
by Diana Abu-Jaber
Pantheon Books, 330 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Volcano
by Garrett Hongo
Alfred A. Knopf, 342 pp., $24.00 (hardcover)

Angela’s Ashes
by Frank McCourt
Scribner, 363 pp., $14.95 (paper)

Talking to High Monks in the Snow
by Lydia Minatoya
HarperCollins Publishers, 269 pp., $13.00 (paper)

Always Running
by Luis Rodriguez
Curbstone Press, 260 pp., $14.00 (paper)

Always remember you’re unique, just like everyone else – Kurt Vonnegut

Something about memoirists seems inherently off-kilter.  What compels certain people to write the story of their lives for thousands of strangers?  And why should the strangers care?  Surely it’s not for the integrity of nonfiction writing.  Just ask James Frey.  At its best and most integral, memoir is truth bent through a prism.  Who remembers the details of a life faultlessly or without bias?  Still, knowing that memoir resides murkily in nonfiction’s basement doesn’t answer the questions, “Why write it?  Why read it?” 

And maybe there’s nothing that does.  But sometimes memories of a life can grow so powerful they demand a corporeal existence, giving a writer no choice but to provide one.  And maybe, for some stories, what’s more important than hard, unflagging facts is the truth that can hide in the imperfection of experience.  In her forward to The Language of Baklava, Diana Abu-Jaber writes, “To me, the truth of stories lies not in their factual precision, but in their emotional core.  Most of the events in this book are honed and altered in some fashion, to give them the curve of stories.”  There.  Emotional core.  Reading a memoir is an invitation – and sometimes a challenge – to sidle up to someone you don’t know and get intimate. 

Always relevant within the genre is memoir’s diverse child, the ethnic memoir.  Not only can its readers claim intimacy with strangers, they can grapple with that ever-present dilemma called otherness.  Sometimes otherness rears up from the most desperate, neglected parts of society, as in Luis Rodriguez’s Always Running and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes.  Often it drives the authors themselves into literal journeys of self discovery, like Garrett Hongo’s in Volcano and Lydia Minatoya’s in Talking to High Monks in the Snow.  And it can thankfully remind us of ourselves, as in Diana Abu-Jaber’s The Language of Baklava.  Otherness or not, the emotional core remains an ever-present current throughout these stories, reminding us how possible and imperative it is to understand each other.

Framed by the struggle the author faces to help his own son traverse uncertain terrain toward a more secure future, Luis Rodriguez’s Always Running is at once personal and implicating.  “Criminality in this country is a class issue,” he writes at the story’s beginning, and then takes his readers into his abyssal days as a Mexican-American gang member in Los Angeles.  Published in 1993, Always Running emerged when Americans were still raw from the outcome of the Rodney King verdict and subsequent uprising; when rap artists were first bringing a glamorized version of gangsta culture to the fore, to the thrill of middle class kids everywhere.  “If you came from the Hills, you were labeled from the start … Already a thug.  It was harder to defy this expectation than just accept it and fall into the trappings,” Rodriguez writes, inciting sympathy from readers whose past – or present – is not written in this book.  But underneath sympathy resides the discomfiting realization that Rodriguez’s prose is laced with fury, frustration and sadness.  It seems to say, “If you don’t know this, take a look.  Because this is reality.”