Two Memoirs

I’ve been in a memoir kind of mood lately, and recently finished two by women my own age dealing with different issues in their lives:

Love and Trouble: A Midlife Reckoning, by Claire Dederer.  Dederer is a writer with a husband and two children, and by all accounts, a wonderful life. This is what she had always wanted. So why all the crying and restlessness and apathy that has suddenly invaded her life? She seeks out her old journals and letters from her youth, and digs up the past, trying to find the “disastrous pirate slut of a girl” she used to be. Turns out, she misses that wreck of a girl, her misadventures and her freedoms, her bad choices and impulsive wanderings. I was drawn to this book because of my own midlife growing pains; Claire Dederer is a brave soul who isn’t afraid to tell her own particular truths.

Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, by Roxane Gay. I’ve been meaning to read Gay’s book of essays, Bad Feminist, for a while now. I haven’t gotten there yet, but her recent memoir caught my eye, and on the heels of Love and Trouble, I hungered for another memoir. Gay’s story, on the surface, is very different from Dederer’s; Gay was raped when she was 12 years old. That violent experience shaped her life from that day on, and she steadily gained weight into adulthood until she became morbidly obese. She used her weight as a shield to protect herself from male attention. She wanted to become invisible, but in doing so, she became, paradoxically, more visible for a very different reason. Gay explores society’s judgmental preoccupation with women’s bodies, and comes to terms with the violence that was done to her.

Both writers explore how women’s lives are defined by their bodies (one trying to hide from the male gaze to protect herself, the other seeking it out to find love and validation). Both are riveting memoirs I won’t soon forget.