Come again?

Hello. I’m sorry for the impromptu hiatus, but it was as necessary as it was unexpected. I’ve been thinking – and playing catch up/reading – and I hope to regain the pace with which I flew through the first six books or so of this project. With five weeks of junior year left and “senioritis” already settling in my bones, I see no sign of that speed returning any time soon. Don’t fret, beloved reader! Memoir, the genre of silent conversation (I see that interrobang (?!, combined) over your furrowed brow. Let me explain…), will always lure me to the nearest armchair. Like any English major, I examine a memoir for its content and form, but judge the work for its character. Memoirs are petitions for sympathy, an open palm extended towards another.

I accept.

Finally returning to this project, I read Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, a book on my “To Read” list since my sophomore year of high school. Born in the U.S., the America of beaming smiles and gilt eagles, McCourt immigrated to Ireland as a young boy. Job scarcity and his father’s alcoholism kept McCourt, his mother, Angela, and his younger brothers on the move, leaving one “lane” (slang for slums or ghettoes) for another, but never out of severe poverty. (I wonder, must a memoir include hardship of some kind, or merely a change, a shock to one’s system?)