Post #89 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler
The Beginners: A Novel by Rebecca Wolff
Reviewed by Lanie Tankard
One definition of memoir is “an account of historical events.” Do you have family history you’d like to present in book form? It’s possible to use your memoir material in a novel.
Poet Rebecca Wolff, editor and publisher of the literary journal Fence, is a descendant of Rebecca Towne Nurse, a woman hung in 1692 during the Salem Witchcraft Trials.
The government compensated Nurse’s family in 1711 for her wrongful death. Playwright Arthur Miller used the trials for his play “The Crucible,” later made into a movie. Miller has noted “the play is not reportage of any kind….what I was doing was writing a fictional story about an important theme.”
Likewise, fact and fiction became blended when Wolff’s curiosity about her family history sent her exploring the graveyards of small New England towns in search of her ancestors. Along the way, imagination took over, resulting in an intriguing debut novel titled The Beginners.
Wolff discusses her construction method in a Wall Street Journal interview, saying she “hung a body on the skeleton of the family story….”
The book is a genre-bending mélange of historical fiction, coming-of-age, gothic mystery, bodice-ripper romance, genealogy search, eerie ghost story, adolescent tale of loss and grief — and, yes, memoir. Just when you think you’ve gotten the novel categorized, another variety emerges. Such shape shifting casts a spell on the reader.
Wolff, who earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, spins sentences into gold as she explores the development of a young girl’s character and personality.
Two strangers move to town and befriend two bored girls. The teenage angst is almost palpable. Students sit on the green “waiting for nothing to happen.” The arrival of a couple willing to talk to the two friends about Life and a world beyond the city limits brings to their summer more than they could ever have desired. Indeed, desire is a recurring theme.
Wolff pushes the power of innuendo. She examines the boundaries of friendship. She explores grief. She parses the mother-daughter relationship. And she engages in a meta-analysis of her own writing method when the main character, Ginger, ponders how to generate terror and fright.
One character, Raquel, keeps a diary, and Wolff delves into the meaning of journal writing. Wolff employs the voice of Raquel to consider how to use history in writing, a question memoirists must confront: “’What shall I do with facts? My book will be written not out of the desire to string together a series of facts’—she hammered the word as though it itself was a curse—‘but out of a need to illustrate a series of events that occur out of time, out of order, that in fact recur rather than occur. I will find an appropriately tragic means of representation for the tragic ends my family has met.’”
Memoir comes in many forms. This book is one of them. As Ginger observes, “what haunts us is imagination.” And there’s a lot to imagine in The Beginners.
Lanie Tankard is a freelance editor and writer in Austin, Texas. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and a former production editor of Contemporary Psychology: A Journal of Reviews.
