#AMREADING: ANGELA PALM’S MEMOIR RIVERINE.

Angela Palm’s memoir reads like a novel. You keep waiting for a plot to develop, for something to happen to the heroine that will create the familiar story arc, but all that’s happening are thoughts and observations in beautiful language.

Childhood

Angela  consults a map and finds that she lives in between two red dots indicating towns, like some half-breed spawn of both worlds and alien to both.

Neither town wants her. She is stunned by this new perspective. Everything I saw was familiar – driveways and houses I’d seen before. These were signs of home, but I felt spat out like bad milk.

Because her house is so far from town, solitary pursuits replaced social ones, and a cacophony of ideas swirled in me.

There was, from a young age, already a disconnect between the way I processed experiences and the way others conducted themselves, the way I was critical of my surroundings and the way others seemed to float through them without taking note of anything.

Teenage years

We knew the land as we knew our teenaged bodies. Ripe, firm. Yielding in places. In those days, running was nothing but an extension of self. Like breathing. There was no labor in it, only direction and the feeling of blood rushing in our veins.

She falls in love – if love was a pull, magnetic and inevitable as gravity. If it was a secret, best kept slow and steady and unspoken.

Returning home after twenty years

I wondered which part is most real – the conscious or the unconscious. Whether the place itself is the thing that stays, or its effects on a person. One is concrete and one is embedded in the brain, in memory.

Image: www.sophisticateddorkiness.com

#amreading Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation.

 

Jenny Offill

Memories are microscopic. Tiny particles that swarm together and apart.

Here are a few swarming memories:

• I remember the sad doggish smell of my sweater on rainy days.
• Work seemed preferable to love. It provided a sturdier kind of happiness.
• The reason you need a home is to keep the people you like in and everyone else out. Forget the doorbell. None of the people I like turned up that way.
• Caring for babies is a task urgent and tedious. Providing those necessary services cuts the day up into little scraps.
• Be careful of what you ridicule. You may end up doing some of those ridiculous things yourself. There is nothing you can be sure you will never be.
• Avoid middle age. That’s when people who were merely eccentric for years become unmistakably mad.