Memoir Archives - A Geography of Reading

The Legacy of Family and I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson

June 21, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 2 Comments

When I pulled I Married Adventure with its rough, zebra-printed cover from my rapidly-thinning to-read shelf this week, I did it because I remember my dad loving the book. I remember how he’d buy copies and sell them along with his other Africana at gun shows. I remembered entering and re-entering that book into his sales database back when Lotus 1-2-3 was a thing.

But on opening the book, I found torn pages held together since long-ago with cellophane tape. This could not have come from my dad’s inventory. I flipped to the inside cover and saw this:

That’s my Baba’s (my father’s mother’s) bookplate. In her maiden name. It had never occurred to me that the love of this book could have had a deeper origin. I started thinking about the quiet, gentle woman my Baba was and how once when I told her that a picture of my Djiedo (grandfather) looked like trouble, her eyes glimmered.

As ever, there was so much more to her than she showed on the surface, and suddenly the image of her reading about a small-town Kansas girl who marries a small-town Kansas boy and sets on a life of real adventure made a lot of sense. I kept this feeling throughout the book and so I felt like I was rediscovering my Baba as I was discovering Martin and Osa Johnson.

A Loving Memoir

I confess, part of the reason I’d avoided reading this book all these years is a niggling fear that the book would be filled with doting accolades from a wife who never felt like she could equal her husband. I’m all for sweetness, tenderness, and love, but overt fawning and the failure for a woman to see her own value make me uncomfortable.

This is not that book. Instead, while Osa Johnson clearly loves and admires her adventurer husband, she devotes equal energy to telling of her own exploits and triumphs. Although Martin was a world traveler before he met her, you get the sense that much of what they achieved together was due to the magic of them as a pair. I loved that. I loved how much they loved each other. I loved what each of them contributed to their adventures from the South Pacific to Africa.

Undiscovered Savages

The one part of this book that’s harder to read in the “modern” age is the way other cultures and races are viewed. This book, although very much of its time, is far less offensive in that way than say Travels With Myself and Another. The Johnsons do traipse into almost undisturbed tribes and they have some uncomfortable adventures along the way. The language is not always politically correct, but she does have respect for the cultures she encounters. And it’s educational to read into how much our perspectives and the way we talk about things have changed in the last 100 years.

There’s also a tension in the book between the Johnson’s love of the animals they are filming. Although they want to educate the world about these animals so they can be preserved, there are moments when they must kill them or be killed and others when they bring friends in to “complete a museum’s collection” with a few key trophies. But Johnson’s un-glossed look at survival among large and sometimes dangerous beasts like elephants and lions helped me realize how complex some of these issues are and the meat from the animals they killed was never wasted like I throw out a steak left in the fridge for too long.

My Father the Adventurer

It felt wonderful to read this book in the few days leading up to Father’s Day. Partially because I finally got to see what he loved in this book. Partially because I gained this warm vision that maybe my quiet, unassuming Baba had encouraged him to become the man he is. And partially because I realized I might be able to do the same for my own son.

My dad has always been a bit of a restless adventurer. When I tell people what he does, I sound like a liar because I say only the part that is relevant to the (always shifting) conversation. While all true, that means I sometimes call him a pilot, forester, economist, woodcarver, bookseller, and more. He took my family to Chile for a year when I lived in second grade. He threatened to take us to Rome when I was in high school. His stories are as big as his laugh and most of them are at least partially true 🙂

My Son, the ?

In contrast, while I’ve traveled extensively on four continents and lived on three, I feel like a homebody. Like my Baba, I do most of my exploration through the pages of books. She visited over 100 countries in her life and saw many things, but I think she was most at home at her melamine breakfast table in Austin, Texas watching the birds, squirrels, and deer feed off the treats she left for them.

So although I am most at home on this couch in our living room snuggling with our dog and listening to the neighborhood birds (all while reading a book and wearing a sweater from Martin + Osa, a brand I only today realized was named for the Johnsons), I now have faith that I’m not limiting my son’s opportunities. Together with my husband, we’ll find new adventures and, I hope, provide a strong platform for this kid to become whoever he wants to be.

There are many ways to adventure, and there are many ways to raise an adventurer. I hope my son finds a life that excites and enriches him. I will take him abroad, eventually, but mostly I will try to emulate Martin Johnson’s mom and just keep my worries about whatever explorations he undertakes to myself. I will trust him to find his way and trust that he knows he always has a safe place to call home. I think that’s part of what worked for my dad as he signed up for the Marines at 17 and flew charters out of Santa Fe in the 1960s.

Conclusion

I Married Adventure ends far too abruptly, but such is life. After all of their adventures abroad, including small plane travel, Martin Johnson was killed in a plane crash on a flight from Utah to California. Osa intimates that they were about to start a new chapter in their lives and maybe settle down. I wonder what that would have looked like. I took comfort in thinking about the richness of their life, though, and the closeness of their connection. We should all be so lucky.

I’m feeling lucky this Father’s Day to live a life filled with adventurers of all kinds. I am grateful to my dad for teaching me how interesting and exciting it is to be abroad in the world. I am grateful to my Baba for showing me that there is adventure at home. And I am grateful to my husband, on his first Father’s Day, for sharing this adventure of life with me. It will be whatever we make it, and there’s nothing more extraordinary than that.

Wishing you a happy Father’s Day too.

If you want to explore the world with I Married Adventure, pick up a copy from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Alzheimer’s, Her Beautiful Brain, and the Art of Memoir

March 15, 2015 by Isla McKetta, MFA 4 Comments

Alzheimer’s is in the news again this week with the death of beloved novelist Terry Pratchett. I say again, but it seems as though Alzheimer’s is never really out of the news. And while my own life has (thankfully) not been touched by this terrible disease, reading Her Beautiful Brain, a memoir of a daughter’s struggle with her mother’s early onset Alzheimer’s by my friend Ann Hedreen, I see how personal and how consuming the disease is both for those who are suffering from it and for each and every one of their family members.

Reading Books by Friends

I only know the post-Alzheimer’s Ann. She had already lost her mother when we met. She was already volunteering for research to help others and she was already advocating for awareness and funding to fight this terrible disease. I met the Ann who was writing this very memoir on the first day of grad school as we both sought to get our chops up and find the writer within.

So reading this book at times felt like a revelation—learning about the story of Ann’s family and her life, watching her become the person I came to know—and at times it felt overly intimate—like I was skipping ahead in our friendship to stories she wouldn’t normally reveal for years to come—stories of adultery and spousal abuse. All of these essays together form the picture of one woman’s life as she grapples with the hand dealt to her and her mother.

I’ve resisted writing a review of this book for a long time (so long that I had to re-re-read the book before sitting down to write) because reviewing books by friends is an impossible task. I can’t be objective. I don’t even want to be. That’s not to say it isn’t an honestly good book. It is. I’ve bought extra copies and pressed them into the hands of caregivers I love. It’s also a very personal book, and I struggle to separate the book from the person I know.

Searching for Impossible Answers

In many ways this book is a quest for answers—an exploration of “how could I not have seen what my mother was suffering earlier?” and “is there any way this could have been avoided?” All of that is moot, of course, but it’s so very human.

As Ann recalls a trip to Haiti where she “should have” noticed her mother’s failing brain, we see signs noticed in retrospect, but in Arlene (Ann’s mom) we also get to know a schoolteacher who not only raised the kinds of kids who venture off to Haiti in the Peace Corps and as filmmakers, but also visits them there despite recent lapses in memory she’s started to find troubling.

When Ann delves into her mother’s early childhood in the blighted mining town of Butte, Montana, we see the environmental devastation that may (or may not) have contributed to the Alzheimer’s, but we also get to understand a life much different from our own—one that bred hardy people.

We don’t know what causes Alzheimer’s or how to stop it, that’s part of the frustration. And Ann does a wonderful job in this book of showing how maddening and important that search for answers is.

On Motherhood

(Aside here, my dad says all I write about is pregnancy these days, to which I respond, duh… 🙂 )

One of the things I related most closely to in this book is Ann’s story not just of being a daughter but of becoming a mother in this time where she was watching her mother decline and eventually waste away. It’s a particular space in life where you get to see aging, birth, and the essence of who you yourself are becoming, and I was grateful for the window into that time (especially at this time for me).

In many ways I think this book is more about those relationships between mothers and daughters than it is about the disease (which makes the book all the more universal).

The Art of Memoir

I’m not a memoirist and any attempts I’ve ever made in that direction have been failures, so I often wonder what makes a good memoir. In Her Beautiful Brain I learned about telling a bigger story than what you think you’re telling. I learned about staring hard at the particular to ground a reader in the moment. And I learned about building analogies between the “small” stories of your life and the “large” stories that make the memoir universal.

I am grateful to Ann for revealing herself in this memoir. I am grateful that she shares how hard caregiving and watching a parent subsume to a disease like Alzheimer’s can be. I am grateful that she also shows how much of the joy of life continues no matter what else is going on.

If someone you love has been affected by Alzheimer’s or you just want to know more, pick up a copy of Her Beautiful Brain from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Poetic Narrative of Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs

May 18, 2012 by Isla McKetta, MFA Leave a Comment

Pablo Neruda had a fascinating life and met all sorts of interesting people from Che Guevara to Federico García Lorca. But in reading his Memoirs, I felt like he was recounting all of these stories to me as opposed to letting me relive them with him. Although Neruda uses some dialogue, he rarely ventures into full-blown scene. The closest he gets are little vignettes like:

“A few hours later I was buying some apples in a fruit store when a horse-drawn carriage halted at the door. A tall, ungainly character dressed in black got out of it. He, too, was going to buy apples. On his shoulder he carried an all-green parrot, which immediately flew over to me and perched on my head without even looking where it was going.”

This section proceeds for three more paragraphs in ten lines as Neruda inquires about the man’s identity. The last paragraph is, “I didn’t know him and I never saw him again. But I accompanied him into the street with due respect, silently opened the carriage door for him and his basket of fruit to get in, and solemnly placed the bird and the sword in his hands.” It is interesting for certain, but it seems as though Neruda is ascribing meaning to the interaction that the reader does not necessarily have access to.

Neruda utilizes a lot of description in his summary and his language is quite poetic, but it is always presented to the reader rather than experienced. There are passages of pure narration that are quite pleasant, “I am writing in Isla Negra, on the coast, near Valparaíso. The powerful winds that whipped the shore have just blown themselves out. The ocean—rather than my watching it from my window, it watches me with a thousand eyes of foam…” At the end of many chapters he includes passages of commentary so descriptive and without chronology or incident that it may be a poem and seem better understood by the soul than the mind: “…How many works of art…There’s not enough room in the world for them anymore…They have to hang outside the rooms…How many books…”

The effect is that the reader is completely at Neruda’s mercy. When something historical or salient emerges, I expect scene and get summary. When he is musing on mundane details, Neruda comes closer to scene than anywhere else in the narrative. It is difficult to engage in a normal fashion with the book for this reason. But he did lead a fascinating life.

I find I am increasingly drawn to books with strong narrators, like Pynchon, Kundera, and Duras, who can weave a spell for me and let me surrender to the narrative. What this book shows me is that a strong narrator is not enough. The narrator has to let me into the world, to give me the keys as it were, otherwise I feel like I am watching Last Year at Marienbad—interesting, but I don’t necessarily understand it enough to engage with it. Most of Neruda’s writing is intelligible, but the lack of sensory detail in the vignettes kept me separate from the narrative. I want to be careful of this in my own work. I am learning it is alright to tend towards summary rather than scene, but if I do, then I have to be very careful about engaging the reader. Otherwise it becomes an oration, not a narration. Readers often pick up a memoir because of who wrote it. Fiction writers need to first build trust with a reader before the reader will follow them.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Memoirs from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.