This weekend I finished reading a memoir called Blackbird, by Jennifer Lauck. It was an engaging page turner that I couldn’t put down, but I had mixed feelings about the story.

What I liked about it was the voice. She chose to write it in first person from the perspective of herself as a child. I found this haunting and unsettling, because just as she didn’t understand what was happening around her, neither do you. She never stepped outside of the child’s voice to interpret the scene or explain what she learned years later. She simply left a million little cliff hangers, unanswered questions, and mysteries unexplored.

It was maddening and brilliant.

As a parent, it reminded me that children don’t have a mental database of reference experiences to draw from like an adult. They watch and listen, but without explanation a child is left with nothing to help them interpret what they’re experiencing. Lauck captures this childlike perspective beautifully with vivid descriptions of body language, facial expressions, and physical sensations.

In reading her story, I became sensitive to how often I respond to my son’s questions in an exasperated tone because OF COURSE the answer should be obvious. But to a seven year old, hardly anything is obvious.

The downside to writing in this childlike perspective is there is no accountability. While it served as a beautiful and chilling way to tell the story, we’re left with no resolution re Lauck’s personal journey. We’re expected to believe everyone around Lauck is filled with wickedness and maliciousness except for her.

While this is a common and expected perspective of most children, I would expect an adult to move beyond this emotion and begin to explore how she might be blind to her own blindness, how things may not have unfolded how she remembered, how the people in her life may be more than one dimensional Disney step-mothers. Lauck gives no indication that she’s matured beyond her childhood anger and feelings of victimhood.

And to my point, I did a little googling after finishing the book and learned that Lauck’s step brother is raising a stink about certain accuracies in her story. He’s gone so far as to write emails to every reviewer, and is pressing the publisher to change the genre of the book from memoir to historical fiction.

On the one hand, I believe she wrote an account of what she remembers seeing and feeling as a child. Though it may not be factually accurate, it’s what she remembers, which is kinda the point of a memoir. But on the other hand, Lauck offers no nuance, no third dimension to her characters, no disclaimer to the memory-based nature of her account. Almost every memoir I’ve read begins with a disclaimer, but not Blackbird.

I don’t doubt that terrible things happened to Lauck, that she was neglected, mistreated, and abandoned. But her story is very one dimensional and filled with unforgiving blame. Though beautifully told, we don’t learn whether she overcame her anger, if she was able to forgive, or in other ways recover from the tragic experiences.

This leaves me wondering if she’s still holding on to that childhood pain.

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[UPDATE]: After sitting on this overnight, I feel like I should mention I didn’t experience a tragic childhood. I may have suffered ongoing consequences due to choices the adults made around me, but I would in no way classify those consequences as tragic. I’m not sure this disqualifies my opinion above, but some might argue that I just have no idea. Which is fine.

I don’t know why this matters to me so much. Maybe it’s because I personally know children who suffered, and I personally know adults who suffered as children. When I read this book I saw those friends in my mind’s eye, and maybe I’m trying to connect and compare Lauck’s experiences with what I know of theirs to make sense of how these tragedies play out and how I can be a good friend.

Anyway, if you read the book, I’m curious about what you think.

• The Cry of the Soul: How Our Emotions Reveal Our Deepest… by Dan B Allender…
• Bossypants by Tina Fey
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

I thought I’d get organized about the books I want to read this year so I created a 2012 Reading List on my Shelfari page.

I’ve come up with 8 and would like 4 more. Any suggestions?

I’d like some more fiction in the mix, but if you have a good non-fiction I’m missing out on, let me know!

Update: Here’s what I read in 2011!

Update: As I add books to this year’s reading list, the shelf above will be updated.

Carole is from a working class family outside of Manhattan. Through hard work and tenacity she worked her way up the ladder at ABC from the age of nineteen when she was hired to duplicate video tapes or something like that. She eventually got into producing, and many of her documentaries won awards.

It was while working at ABC that she met her husband, Anthony Radziwill, who is John Kennedy’s cousin on his mother’s side. When John began dating Carolyn Bessett, she and Carol became friends. Best friends, eventually. Carolyn was her closest confidante as she waded through years of cancer treatments and operations, often accompanying them on their hospital trips to lend support and good humor.

What Remains is not marketed as a Kennedy story, and I never got the sense she was name dropping or taking advantage of the friendship to promote her book – though I did notice she begins the book by describing the events of the Kennedy airplane crash before flashing back to her childhood memories. But honestly, it comes off more as a great hook than a cheap ploy. Anyway, we get no Kennedy fluff – just the parts of them that describe her closeness with Carolyn and John’s closeness with Anthony – they were best friends, and in the telling she respects their privacy.

I first heard about the book several years ago while on the treadmill at the gym – there was an excerpt of it in Oprah’s magazine that absolutely captivated me. It was this passage that grabbed me, and the reason I eventually came to read the whole thing:

There is an imperceptible shift of a life in the moment of time between the event and the knowing. After the thing has happened, but before someone has said it.

It’s the moment before you pick up the phone and something is announced. They’re not here yet and I was just wondering, are they there? With you? When the thing is still yours to lose. It’s not real until you say it out loud. This is what it feels like, the click between one life and another. This is the blink of time between the way things are, and then never the same again. Like changing the channel on a television. It’s this way – click – and now it’s this. This, and then this. Fate. Fortune.

She was reading Anna Karenina when the plane went down. She was reading quietly and sipping wine. Occasionally she would pause from her reading and gaze out the window at the water, not knowing her friend’s life was ending as she crashed into that same body of water.

You never know when something is going to happen to change your life, You expect it to arrive with fanfare, like a wedding or a birth, but instead it comes in the most ordinary of circumstances.

Carole’s husband, Anthony Radziwill, fought against cancer for five years – almost the length of their entire relationship. She describes how it swallowed them up, how it consumed their lives even though Anthony seemed in denial for most of the ordeal, how she hated it and at times wanted out.

For the last year, in particular, Carole prepared herself for his death. Even wished for it, at times, when he came close but pulled through. Not because she was cruel, but because she was overwhelmed, and losing hope, and not sure she could continue keeping up the pace.

One summer in 1999, as Anthony’s strength was leaving him and his ribs poked through his skin – the summer John Kennedy began writing the eulogy for his cousin’s funeral – death came suddenly and out of nowhere. A plane crashed into the ocean – John and Carolyn Kennedy’s plane.

I tried to imagine it: Bryan sick, dying, years of treatments, hope, and hope lost. Surrounded by friends who hold me up, who listen, who make us laugh, who rescue us from thinking about dying. Then, the friends are suddenly gone. All the support, the shoulders for crying, the hands for wiping tears: gone. I can’t imagine the isolation she felt after that.

Her husband, Anthony, died three weeks later.

For all the influence and resources the Family had for cutting edge treatments, for hundreds of flights to a D.C. hospital, for countless vacations to islands I’ve never heard of where they pretended they didn’t have cancer – for all their privilege and power – they still had to experience what every person, what every family experiences, when someone is terminally ill. Each of them still fell into a particular role, whether deny-er, fixer, soother, problem solver, rescuer.

In the end, no amount of money or family influence could save Anthony from cancer or John from crashing.

What Remains is well-written and descriptive of grief both planned for and taken by surprise. I highly recommend it.