Memoir Book Review: Boyd Lemon’s Digging Deep, Reviewed by Sharon Lippincott

Post #91 – Women’s Memoirs, Book & Video Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler

Something to Learn about Memoir Writing

Sharon Lippincott writes monthly for Women’s Memoirs about the topic of Writing and Healing. Her valuable posts provide insights into the research and practice that results in writing with positive, transformative outcomes.

Recently Sharon contacted me about a memoir she’d read to see if we’d be interested in a review. The small wrinkle — the memoir is by a man. Once Sharon and I talked this through, it become clear that she’d pinpointed a memoir we can learn from because the author, Boyd Lemon, had reached deep inside his experiences to analyze and understand what had gone wrong.

Enough said. I assured Sharon we’d be quite interested in her review. We think you’ll agree.

Digging Deep by Boyd Lemon
Reviewed by Sharon Lippincott

If only I knew what he was thinking! What woman hasn’t had this thought about a husband, lover, relative, colleague, or friend? It seems clear that they don’t think the same way we do — or do they? Sometimes we get glimpses, but the shroud of silence is often difficult to penetrate.

Boyd Lemon rips down all the curtains in his memoir Digging Deep: A Writer Uncovers His Marriages. Lemon’s path led him into an early marriage for many wrong reasons to a woman he hardly knew. That marriage didn’t last. Neither did his second or third. He was humiliated by his lack of success as a husband and determined to do better with the second and third tries. He funded his floundering personal life with a career as a highly paid attorney—a profession that, like marriage, he entered for many of the wrong reasons.

After retiring and moving from southern California to Boston, he decided to write a memoir for the specific purpose of determining what role he had played in the meltdown of his marriages, each of which was quite different from the others. He pulls no punches as he explores each marriage in turn. We become aware of his emotional reactions, his floundering, his cluelessness at the time. He makes no excuses for himself. He doesn’t make many for his wives either, and he’s shockingly candid about their behavior, especially the second one. She was still wet behind the ears when he became involved with her and introduced her to alcohol. Their California lifestyle fit all the clichés —parties, drugs, sex, booze — even the meltdown. The R-rated material is occasionally explicit, but only enough to keep the story focused and moving.

His third wife refused to read the book, assuming many disclosures would be devastating. That seems well advised. Painful? Yes. But true. Deeply honest and true. Lemon confirms what many sense and dread to hear. He is not proud of the way he felt or acted, but he doesn’t shrink from writing his truth for the world to hear and learn from.

Though he makes no excuses for himself, he is compassionate toward his wives, explaining that he had done virtually nothing to understand their point of view or make his own clear. At the same time, he does observe that there’s a remote chance things could have been different if they had been more forthright and forceful in stating their cases.

I read this masterfully written book virtually non-stop. His unique layered structure is a powerful vehicle for conveying heavy doses of reflection and insight and describing his analytical process. Although his historical thinking was typically masculine, by the end my intuition was confirmed that gender plays no part in the process of introspection and personal discovery. We all experience it in much the same way.

By the time I finished the book, I’d come to the conclusion that Lemon serves as an icon for a couple of generations of men. While details vary widely, I recognized many general attributes of my father and his generation, as well as my husband and the early boomer generation who came of age during the fifties and sixties.

Lemon’s understanding of the “contract” between husbands and wives seems to be taken from something carved in stone that we all understood, but never fully articulated. He articulates it. Writing gets thoughts out where we can see them and work with them, even when someone else does the writing. After reading Digging Deep, I have a clearer understanding of invisible forces at work in my relationships with many of the men in my past — even a few current ones.

(Kindle version shown to the left) I highly recommend this book to any woman seeking more understanding of the typical male mind, specifically of early and mid-twentieth century, and to anyone, male or female, seeking a role model for personal exploration. The book is available in both print and digital form on Amazon, and non-Kindle digital editions are available on Smashwords.

Want to know more? Here’s the book trailer for Digging Deep.

Thanks Sharon for your review. I think you’ve given us two great takeaways for memoir writers: (1) Dig deep and (2) Be honest. We knew we should do both of these but you’ve given us a memoir that explicates these concepts.

Oh, by the way. Boyd Lemon is an active member on our Women’s Memoirs group on LinkedIn. If you haven’t joined us there, we invite you to come on over.

You can reach Sharon at:
Heart and Craft
Writing For Health

Tagged as: memoir, memoir and healing, memoir book review, Memoir writing