Our Favorite Books of 2006
Rothschild, Kate Clinton, Ruth Conniff, Anne-Marie Cusac, Elizabeth DiNovella, Susan J. Douglas, Bar
Our Favorite Books of 2006 By Kate Clinton In a year when Oprah had blown a righteous gasket at being pretexted by James Frey, I waded cautiously into the memoir genre. But the following memoirs...
...But the following memoirs invite such deep experiential reading, all caution is gone with the wind...
...She candidly reveals the terror beneath her secure-seeming childhood and connects that with the terror told to her by women in Mexico, Afghanistan, Bosnia, and America in the age of 9/11 and Katrina...
...I reread it...
...Through nearly obsessive, perfectly rendered detail and spare prose, Bechdel documents her coming of age as a woman and lesbian in the context of her relationship with her closeted father...
...Ensler's voice is of a practical and spirited spirituality...
...If the Creek Don't Rise: My Life Out West with the Last Black Widow of the Civil War, by Rita Williams, is her story of being orphaned at four and being raised by her resentful Aunt Daisy in the Colorado Rockies...
...I stared at individual pages...
...and answered, "The world would split open," must be smiling...
...Kate Clinton is a humorist...
...Williams is a great storyteller, and at excruciatingly personal moments, layered with adolescent angst and racial isolation, I hoped she was lying, but knew she wasn't...
...I kept thinking of Mae West's devastating, "Most men want to protect me...
...The long lunacy of slavery fuels Rita's story of extended family, legacy, and ambition in the 1960s and '70s...
...can't figure out from what...
...And you thought Jim McGreevey's memoir was graphic...
...Somewhere the poet Muriel Rukeyser, who asked, "What would happen if one woman told the truth of her life...
...Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, by Alison Bechdel, lacks the long clarifying subtitle that is apparently mandated in publishing law, but it is a stunning and poignant memoir...
...This is a memoir that keeps on giving...
...Insecure at Last: Losing It in Our Security-Obsessed World, by Eve Ensler, is a mix of personal history and reportage...
Vol. 70 • December 2006 • No. 12
