Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

“Is memoir therapy? Or is it vengeance?”

Motherwell by Deborah Orr

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I was very sad to see that Deborah Orr died in 2019 of cancer when I was doing some googling after reading this book. It’s always so strange to be in someone’s point of view reading their memoir and picturing them alive, and then realizing that this is the only book they’ll ever write. Cancer really robs the world of so much infinite potential. Motherwell is Orr’s memoir of growing up in the titular steel mill town of Motherwell during the 60s and 70s. I […]

“My mother had little sense of childhood, and simply saw it as an inconvenient life stage to be got through as quickly as possible.”

Diamonds at the Lost and Found by Sarah Aspinall

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I bought a lot of memoirs on my vacation this summer and realized when I got home how many are about fraught mother-daughter relationships. I guess I’m working through something, or else I just like reading about dramatic psychological family structures. Either way, Diamonds at the Lost and Found fits in the template of the troubled mother and the put-upon daughter who’s dragged in her wake. This book takes a nested narrative format, where Aspinall simultaneously tells the story of her childhood and adolescence being […]

War Inflicts Invisible Wounds Too

Hospital Sketches from the Civil War by Louisa May Alcott

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Hospital Sketches from the Civil War by Louisa May Alcott My rating: 4 of 5 stars I’ve always enjoyed Alcott’s writing, but somehow had never heard of this book until my wife came across it at a bookstore. This book is autobiographical although Alcott doesn’t reveal the name of the hospital or the actual names of her patients. The tone starts out in a very dramatic and somewhat humorous fashion. In some ways it feels like Alcott is satirizing the fact that all women could […]

“[Books] made the nights stretch out, they made thoughts unfurl, out from the small pool of light cast by my bedside lamp, into the night and out over the prairie…”

Epilogue by Will Boast

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Epilogue is a grief memoir, as Will Boast’s mother, brother and father all die in quick succession while he is in college. The book focuses mostly on his relationship with his father and the discovery that there Boast has two half-brothers from his father’s prior marriage. The opening chapter where he describes his father’s death is haunting and very compelling writing, as his father’s life-long refusal to complain or show pain results in him refusing to call for help and dying alone in his car […]

“…we never stopped longing for time to pass, to release us back into our families – or what remained of them.”

Rosie: Scenes from a Vanished Life by Rose Tremain

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This is a very good but very sad memoir about Rose Tremain’s emotionally neglectful childhood growing up in post-war England. After her mother and father get divorced, she is sent off at age ten to a boarding school, compounding the neglect she had already faced. Her mother Jane also went through a traumatic abandonment at boarding school and seems to have been incapable of connecting to Tremain and her siblings. Jane is focused on only her own pleasure, as she gets remarried to a wealthy […]

Two Memoirs of Growing Up During The Troubles

Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Seamas O'Reilly

The Troubles With Us by Alix O'Neill

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These two memoirs tread a lot of the same ground (Northern Ireland during The Troubles, family drama/grief, all told humorously), but I honestly liked Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? better than The Troubles With Us simply because Séamas O’Reilly is a better writer and I really enjoy his voice. His memoir follows his family in the aftermath of his mother’s death when he’s five. His father is left with eleven children to take care of and the rest of the book is a series of […]



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