It’s memoir day, from overcoming disability to family life in Minnesota.
(Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press)
“Ghosts of Fourth Street”: by Laurie Hertzel (University of Minnesota Press, $24.95)
Laurie Hertzel (Courtesy of the author)
If you are thinking about writing memoir or creative nonfiction, consider Laurie Hertzel’s memoir your textbook. Subtitled “My Family, a Death, and the Hills of Duluth,” it’s not surprising that this involving story is both tender and amusing since the author is former books editor for the Star Tribune, winner of a Minnesota Book Award, and distinguished professor at the University of Georgia low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction.
Hers is a colorful story about being the shy, quiet, often lonely seventh of 10 children growing up in the 1960s in a house in Duluth that was usually chaotic with kids everywhere, all of them readers. Her mother, Trish, was always busy with a new baby, and her father, known as Guv, had two moods — good or bad.
“I spent most of my time alone, wandering and spying,” she writes. “I crawled under the dining room table and sat cross-legged on the braided oval rug, hidden by the long white tablecloth, and kept an eye on whoever was in my line of vision. I riffled through my big sister’s desk drawers and jacket pockets, opening their letters, reading their diaries, scooping up their spare change, looking for clues.”
At the beginning of the book, Hertzel hints of the death of her brother, the oldest child who often clashed with their father. But it isn’t until near the end we learn the sad news that changed the family on June 11, 1966, when Bobby drowned while water skiing.
But before the family splintered with Bobby’s death and the older children moving out, Hertzel gives readers a detail-filled picture of growing up in a family where siblings hoped for brief times alone with their parents. She recalls how one of her older sisters “ironed” the curly hair of another sister on the ironing board. (Anyone who knows Hertzel or has seen her at readings can understand the curly hair anecdote.)
One fascinating character is Guv, who insisted on dinner being served at 7:30 p.m., with soft music playing and candles lit. Hertzel recalls how “Every night, the call to dinner came in stages…” and the menu was made up of food her father asked her mother to prepare, which she did, making everything from scratch. Guv also snatched a child or two before dinner for a drink of V-8 juice or apple juice because a pre-dinner drink was “civilized.”
Some of the happiest parts of the book are Hertzel’s memories of Christmas rituals, beginning after Thanksgiving with holiday songs, and birthdays that gave young Laurie a day in the spotlight when she was usually ignored by her siblings.
About those ghosts? The author’s grandfather made friends with the ghost of a man who walked through the house nightly and seemed to live behind the furnace.
After Bobby drowned, the family was never the same. Laurie recalls her mother’s screams when she heard the news, and how her brother’s body looked like a wax figure in his coffin. She lived, then, in a house “haunted with sorrow” and Bobby’s ghost.
Read “Ghosts of Fourth Street” for Hertzel’s way with storytelling and for getting to know her colorful family.
Hertzel will read Tuesday in the Readings by Writers series. (See today’s Literary Events calendar).
(Courtesy of University of Minnesota Press)
“An Eye For an I: Growing Up With Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness”: by James Francisco Bonilla (University of Minnesota Press, $18.95)
James Bonilla explores the intersection of race and disability in this involving memoir in which he writes: “Growing up I sometimes felt like an imposter, too sighted to be seen as blind, too light-skinned to be seen as Puerto Rican. This often left me feeling isolated and apart, not really belonging to either group.”
Bonilla, a New York-born Puerto Rican writer, is a retired Hamline University professor who has written and presented nationally and internationally on diversity, cultural competence and leadership.
Born with congenital cataracts, Bonilla had limited vision in his right eye and none in his left. After he was accidentally hit in his “good” eye by a horseshoe, he was legally blind for 10 years until he underwent surgery at 19, made possible by new medical technology.
Bonilla’s sightless years taught him a lot about how our society responds to people with disabilities, including being harassed by bullies at school. As an adult, he was once waiting for a friend at an intersection when a large man picked him up off the ground and hauled him across the street, where he didn’t want to go. As Bonilla puts it, he was “nearly killed by kindness.”
Besides his sight problems, Bonilla was dealing with childhood trauma of having a sometimes-violent mother suffering from severe mental illness. In later years he tried to understand that life couldn’t have been easy for his mother, a single Puerto Rican woman trying to raise a son.
Bonilla finally found his way to healing and peace through the outdoors, becoming a camp counselor and guide. From the giant redwood trees of California to a vision quest in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, nature became a home to him.
(Courtesy)
“My Journey My Way”: by Donna Lagorio Montgomery (independently published, $17)
First published in 2018, this friendly paperback details growing up “old school,” as the author puts it. Montgomery is the mother of eight children, and she’s a grandmother. Her previous books include one on kids modeling, based on her family’s experiences, as well as the spiritual “Bread & Wine,” and “Coffee Talk,” made up of short thoughts and reflections. In “My Journey…” Montgomery writes of having her own “Auntie Mame” and memories of her first job. She reminds us of a past that is nearly lost in our current tech-driven world.
(Courtesy of the author)
“Blooming Hollyhocks: Tales of Joy During Hard Times”: by Naomi Helen Yaeger (Beaver’s Pond Press, $16.95)
Duluth-based Yaeger, a writer, reporter and Earthkeeper, returns us to the past in this memoir of her mother Janette’s childhood in the 1930s and ’40s, based on stories the author heard as a child. The title comes from the pink, white and red hollyhocks that grew alongside Grandmother’s house from which an aunt fashioned flower dolls.
Set mostly in Avoca, a small town in southwest Minnesota, Janette’s childhood included out-of-work men fed by her mother, Winifred, during the Great Depression. Her father, Russell, a railroad telegrapher, was lucky to have a good salary. Some of Janette’s happiest days were at the extended family’s farm, where the feral kittens spit and bit at everyone and fruit of the mulberry tree was always available for snacking in season. They were the first family in the town to buy a Norge refrigerator, replacing the rubber-aproned ice man.
Janette went on to a nursing school with connections to Hamline University. While she was in training, the hardware store her parents owned in Avoca was destroyed in a fire that wiped out most of a block of buildings. In the end, Janette is married to Earl and dreams of earning a public health degree from the University of Minnesota. There are lots of photos of family weddings concluding the book.
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