Daimys – Response to Borkowski Ch. 5-8

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#678

The parts that worked for me most in these chapters were the ones where he was talking about his family. The scenes where he is describing how his sister ‘threw herself into extracurricular activities’ after her father left or how his mother would give him ‘wise words of advice’ every time his dad was outside waiting for him so that his father was waiting up to twenty minutes without being able to shut the car off were much more enjoyable than him trying to speculate as to why he decided to rob the pizza guy, or how girls just understood him better.

Those parts seem like he’s trying too hard to be critical, or to be understanding. I can understand the need to find answers, and I think he’s putting himself in such a vulnerable position when he lets the reader into his thought process as to why he would do these things – but he doesn’t need to prove to me that he’s a ‘good’ person; I’m in, I’m committed to his story, I’ve read past chapter one where he first set all that up. I don’t need the repetition of ‘I’m really grateful I got shot’ and ‘I was so dumb for committing this crime’ and ‘something inside me told me not to commit this crime’ and ‘I don’t blame anyone’ every twenty pages or so. I just want to know more about him at that time.

I think that’s why I enjoy the scenes with his father so much – because he seems reluctant to write about it and does so only when he absolutely has to. Those scenes are just descriptions of what happened – where his dad took him, what his dad bought him. And any sort of analysis about the father is always from another’s point of view: the mother thought he was bribing their son, the sister couldn’t stand him, he was a silent man so there was nothing much to say about it. I always find myself wanting more from those scenes — I will admit that I don’t seem to like the ‘more’ when done with other people, so maybe I can’t be pleased with memoir.

My favorite chapter in this section was chapter 7. The story revolves around his stay in the hospital as he’s recovering, and while he does drift off to moments of ‘advice’ or ‘truth’ he always comes back to the scene, laying out the next bit as groundwork for the next insightful moment. Each part of the scene that is described as purpose. The description is what leads to the message/truth, the the truth/message does not lead to the description.

Some beautiful lines:
Only one letter separates cosmic from comic, after all. (119)
An indescribable rush of infinity and temporality washed over me. (121).

[Sondra Perl]

#685

Dear Daimys,
I seem to be stuck on the memoir-as-a-genre question today, because your post made me think about it too when you wondered if maybe you can’t be pleased with memoir. It brought up more questions for me about the genre: is it impossible to be satisfied with a memoir? Will the reader always want more because, unlike in fiction or even biography, the writer and the subject are the same person and seem so…accessible? And, in writing memoir, at what point does it stop being a memoir? At what point does it become a critical essay or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, fiction? Not because you start making things up, but because if you are trying to write about yourself using the same tools developed for fictional characters, you have to become a character at some point, even if you are still you and all of this stuff really happened.

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