A Reason to Love Memoirs Again

She Left Me the GunIn a review that will be appear in the print NYT tomorrow, Dwight Garner writes that Emma Brockes’s account of trying to piece together the mysteries of her mother’s past, She Left Me the Gun (Penguin Press), is “…one of those memoirs that remind you why you liked memoirs in the first place, back before every featherhead in your writers’ group was trying to peddle one. It has the density of a very good novel.”

That quote is only topped by a those from the book itself, such as, “Being an only child is a bit like being Spanish: you have your dinner late, you go to bed late, and, with all the grown-up parties you get dragged to, you wind up eating a lot of hors d’oeuvres.”

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