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rushthatspeaksNote: I will be attempting to write about this book as though the author were not, in fact, a dear friend. I suspect that it won't work, but I am going to make an effort.
I read a lot of memoirs. I'm not sure how I got into the habit of it, but I can't remember not prowling the biography section for items of interest the same way that I prowl the fiction, and I'm thoroughly familiar with the unspoken conventions of the various forms of memoir-- the tell-all confessional, the Explanation Of A Particular Illness Or Circumstance (my life with XYZ), the I-know-someone-famous, the I-am-someone-famous, the travelogue, the postmodernist experiment, the comedy. I've read brilliant, wonderful books in each category (even the I-know-someone-famous and the postmodernist experiment), and I've read my share of horrible, eye-bleedingly hideous writing.
Rachel Manija Brown's memoir is a one-off, a kind of memoir I haven't read before, and I admire it tremendously.
At first glance, it's black comedy a la Augusten Burroughs (whose Running With Scissors is an openly acknowledged influence here), and an Explanation of Circumstance, and something of a travelogue.
When Rachel was seven, her parents moved the family from California to the ashram of the guru Meher Baba in a backwater in India. She was the only foreign child in town, was treated dreadfully at her school, and was surrounded by people somewhere on the line between craziness and religious devotion, who occasionally drastically slipped into outright insanity. Her teachers beat her, the local children threw rocks at her, and her mother retreated into an obsessive faith which could not have been easy to live with. It is a very, very funny book, and the details are deftly and precisely remembered: Rachel's school, which was self-consciously modeling itself on English boarding schools, managed to make itself into a parody of the horrible schools depicted in various British novels, but a parody rotated through a looking glass into the surreality of dream or nightmare. Rachel's genius is in letting the place itself point out its own satiric elements: from the moment she mentions that it was called Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ the Saviour Convent School we know exactly what it's going to be like, and stare at it in shocked, uneasy laughter. Rachel's own sense of humor is both her saving grace and ours, and the factual reality of the world around her builds itself up in a richly deadpan cascade of madness.
Until, eventually, it can't be read as funny anymore, precisely, but you have to laugh, because there is no other way to bear it, because the whole thing is so dreadfully absurd. And then laughter runs out. And then, by means of a complex flashback structure interwoven with the childhood narrative, we can see how both Rachel as child and Rachel as woman have confronted the horrors that happened, and healed enough to bring out the sense of humor, the sense of laughter in the first place, so that the end of the book is implicit in its beginning and the beginning, the beginning of the work of writing a comedy, implicit as following after its ending.
I haven't seen that before. Generally, what I've seen in the genre of memoir-black-comedy is failed comedy, or self-pity (neither of which are present here), or, in the best cases ( and yes, this is how I read Augusten Burroughs) a kind of deep cynicism that laughs at the idea that healing is possible, an essentially bitter sort of laughter. Rachel's laughter is sometimes pained, but genuine.
It's a wonderful book, and you should all go read it, because the details are fascinating and the anecdotes are interesting and did I mention that this thing is frickin' hilarious? And you should read it because it's something new, and because it is a powerful work of healing, and because the fact that it both reminded me of some of the horrible things about my own childhood and made me laugh simultaneously made me realize that, well, some of the horrible things in my own childhood were pretty damn funny too. Which helps. Also, this book is a great evocation of a time and place in India, and of a religion, that most of us don't hear about much.
There are some flaws in it, mind you-- it's not a perfect book, and in my opinion it takes a while to get going, really kicking in about halfway through the first chapter, and there's a segment on Indian history and legend that feels like too much infodump coming before the explanation of why the infodump is necessary (though yes, the infodump *is* necessary)-- but in general the whole complicated structure hangs together. It doesn't read in an overly complicated fashion either; it's gripping, a downright page-turner, and one that I think will soon be finding a very large audience.
*takes off critic hat*
As I have mentioned: Rachel, you rock. And thank you for writing this.
I read a lot of memoirs. I'm not sure how I got into the habit of it, but I can't remember not prowling the biography section for items of interest the same way that I prowl the fiction, and I'm thoroughly familiar with the unspoken conventions of the various forms of memoir-- the tell-all confessional, the Explanation Of A Particular Illness Or Circumstance (my life with XYZ), the I-know-someone-famous, the I-am-someone-famous, the travelogue, the postmodernist experiment, the comedy. I've read brilliant, wonderful books in each category (even the I-know-someone-famous and the postmodernist experiment), and I've read my share of horrible, eye-bleedingly hideous writing.
Rachel Manija Brown's memoir is a one-off, a kind of memoir I haven't read before, and I admire it tremendously.
At first glance, it's black comedy a la Augusten Burroughs (whose Running With Scissors is an openly acknowledged influence here), and an Explanation of Circumstance, and something of a travelogue.
When Rachel was seven, her parents moved the family from California to the ashram of the guru Meher Baba in a backwater in India. She was the only foreign child in town, was treated dreadfully at her school, and was surrounded by people somewhere on the line between craziness and religious devotion, who occasionally drastically slipped into outright insanity. Her teachers beat her, the local children threw rocks at her, and her mother retreated into an obsessive faith which could not have been easy to live with. It is a very, very funny book, and the details are deftly and precisely remembered: Rachel's school, which was self-consciously modeling itself on English boarding schools, managed to make itself into a parody of the horrible schools depicted in various British novels, but a parody rotated through a looking glass into the surreality of dream or nightmare. Rachel's genius is in letting the place itself point out its own satiric elements: from the moment she mentions that it was called Holy Wounds of Jesus Christ the Saviour Convent School we know exactly what it's going to be like, and stare at it in shocked, uneasy laughter. Rachel's own sense of humor is both her saving grace and ours, and the factual reality of the world around her builds itself up in a richly deadpan cascade of madness.
Until, eventually, it can't be read as funny anymore, precisely, but you have to laugh, because there is no other way to bear it, because the whole thing is so dreadfully absurd. And then laughter runs out. And then, by means of a complex flashback structure interwoven with the childhood narrative, we can see how both Rachel as child and Rachel as woman have confronted the horrors that happened, and healed enough to bring out the sense of humor, the sense of laughter in the first place, so that the end of the book is implicit in its beginning and the beginning, the beginning of the work of writing a comedy, implicit as following after its ending.
I haven't seen that before. Generally, what I've seen in the genre of memoir-black-comedy is failed comedy, or self-pity (neither of which are present here), or, in the best cases ( and yes, this is how I read Augusten Burroughs) a kind of deep cynicism that laughs at the idea that healing is possible, an essentially bitter sort of laughter. Rachel's laughter is sometimes pained, but genuine.
It's a wonderful book, and you should all go read it, because the details are fascinating and the anecdotes are interesting and did I mention that this thing is frickin' hilarious? And you should read it because it's something new, and because it is a powerful work of healing, and because the fact that it both reminded me of some of the horrible things about my own childhood and made me laugh simultaneously made me realize that, well, some of the horrible things in my own childhood were pretty damn funny too. Which helps. Also, this book is a great evocation of a time and place in India, and of a religion, that most of us don't hear about much.
There are some flaws in it, mind you-- it's not a perfect book, and in my opinion it takes a while to get going, really kicking in about halfway through the first chapter, and there's a segment on Indian history and legend that feels like too much infodump coming before the explanation of why the infodump is necessary (though yes, the infodump *is* necessary)-- but in general the whole complicated structure hangs together. It doesn't read in an overly complicated fashion either; it's gripping, a downright page-turner, and one that I think will soon be finding a very large audience.
*takes off critic hat*
As I have mentioned: Rachel, you rock. And thank you for writing this.
