Post #57 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
With America’s continuing involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, with nightly news reports of war deaths — military as well as civilian — my mind turns to the lives of those changed forever by these events. This caused me to read Hero Mama: A Daughter Remembers the Father She Lost in Vietnam–and the Mother Who Held Her Family Together by Karen Spears Zacharias. This 2005 book that looks back to the Vietnam War is a sober reminder of the lifelong impact of a wartime death.
Hero Mama will grab your attention, hold your interest page after page, and cause you to remember others you have known who suffered through the death of a loved one. Here’s a good example of the author’s message:
“It’s hard to explain what losing a father does to a family. Daddy’s death is the road marker we kids use to measure our life’s journey. Before his death, ours was a home filled with intimacy and devotion. After his death, it was filled with chaos and destruction.
“I thought about our family’s loss decades later while reading an article published in The Oregonian. It was the police account of a young man whose body had surfaced in the Columbia River. Hoping that somebody could help identify the boy, the newspaper ran a photo of the shirt he was wearing. It was a custom-made-T-shirt with the picture of a skull on it. Law enforcement officials couldn’t identify the boy because his head was missing.
“That shirt was his only legacy. And unless someone recognized it, his headless body would be buried in a grave marked “John Doe.” Whatever thoughts or memories his soul would carry into the afterlife would literally be cut off forever.
“I think that’s what losing Daddy did to us. With him gone, we were headless. It was as if somebody came into our home with a machete and in one swift slice decapitated our entire family.” (pp. 14-15)
Later in the book, she restates her theme this way:
“Looking back, it’s hard to tell which of our family’s problems were the result of Daddy’s death and which were the result of our own sorry choices. Truth is, after Daddy died, none of us could think too clearly anymore.” (p. 85)
In today’s blog, in addition to recommending Hero Mama, I’d like to look at this memoir in terms of a writing tip for memoir writers. As you craft the outline, one issue is how much attention to give to the multiple topics you want to cover in your memoir. I was particularly struck by the way that Zacharias developed her book. She provides at least one author’s perspective on this question. Zacharias covers the period 1965-2003, 38 years. Because her focus is the impact of her father’s death, she devotes the greatest number of pages to the time around her father’s death in July 1966. Although the memoir does not go year by year, I did some simple math: She has 42.5 pages for each 1965 and 1966. Then she covers the next 35 years with about 6.6 pages per year. Then her pace slows down again as she covers 2003, the year she goes to Vietnam to come to terms with a war, a country, and a people who killed her father, in a longer 40 pages.
I hope this tip, derived from reading Hero Mama will give you a new way to think about the pacing of your memoir and the amount of focus you want to give to each topic. Meanwhile, I think you’ll find Hero Mama a good read and one that will inspire you as you write your memoir.
