I first learned about Lucy Grealy in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams. Grealy had written a book with a title that Jamison had, while an English student at Harvard in the early 2000s, imagined using for her own memoir: Autobiography of a Face. The fact that Jamison had not heard of Grealy’s 1994 hit suggests that it had, within just a few years of its publication, fallen into relative obscurity. Autobiography of a Face—which chronicles Grealy’s disfiguring childhood cancer and reconstructive facial surgeries—was, upon its release, a bestseller and the subject of interviews with Terry Gross, Charlie Rose, CNN, and the Today show. It was a sensation then and is a painfully resonant work in our image-obsessed, plastic surgery culture now.
And its legacy has been enriched by the literature it’s inspired—from Ann Patchett’s 2002 memoir of her friendship with Grealy to Jamison’s 2014 meditation on beauty and identity. Autobiography of a Face is ostensibly about isolation but has in fact become part of a larger story of literary collaboration and the boundaries between artists, friends, and their work.
One of the more curious aspects of Darwin’s trip to the Falklands relates to the warrah, a wolf-like creature and the sole terrestrial mammal inhabiting the isolated archipelago. How did the animal get to the islands in the first place, and could its presence in the Falklands hint at unexplored history?
I was eager to explore such questions recently, when I retraced Darwin’s travels in the South Atlantic. Flying to the Argentine coastal city of Puerto Madryn, I linked up with the Darwin 200 Initiative, a scientific expedition on the high seas. I then sailed aboard the tall Dutch ship Oosterschelde, as we made our way to isolated islands en route to Port Stanley. Unfortunately, the crew and I were not able to observe the warrah: the animal which had so intrigued Darwin went extinct due to overhunting in 1876, some forty years after the scientist had departed.
To my mind, the world is split into people like my sister and people like me: Rememberers and Forgetters. My friend Sarah is a Forgetter. “A few years after a period ends, it disappears,” she says. “Save for a few especially emotional moments, there are entire swaths of my life that are blank.” My friend Henry is a Forgetter too. (Henry and Sarah are both pseudonyms.) “Whenever I’m reading an interview where someone is talking about how they got to where they are, they’ll drop these anecdotes, and I’m like, What? I don’t have anecdotes like that,” he says. When I asked a friend at work about her memory, she said, “I guess if I picked, say, the summer after sixth grade, I could remember what books I was reading, which friend I was hanging out with most, the time she cut my hair, what math exercises I did, and what I was doing on the computer. You can’t?” Rememberer.
This didn’t seem to be a particularly useful distinction until a year ago, when a family friend died. The friend and I didn’t see each other often, so I had only a few memories of her along with a general sense that I’d loved her very much. My sister, who saw her as often as I did, told me she was flooded with memories after her death, that reliving them felt haunting and exhausting. I wondered if this meant she felt much sadder. Of course, memory and selfhood are intrinsically tied; there are entire schools of thought dedicated to the subject. But it seemed as though our capacities for memory — hers, teeming; mine, not so much — might mean we experienced the world differently.
I like a good burger as much as the next girl. This past weekend at a family cookout, I indulged in a damn good one. But each delicious beefy bite brought with it a bitter aftertaste. You see, I’m an environmentalist hell-bent on making daily choices that support a healthy planet. And beef, I’m sure you’ve heard, has a hefty environmental impact. According to Project Drawdown, switching to a plant-based diet and reducing food waste are by far the top two high-impact personal climate actions we can take.
The great strength of Private Rites is that it never commits to an apocalyptic vision, even as the world it depicts becomes cartoonishly apocalyptic. In the final, astonishingly moving pages, the narrator affirms her commitment to dailiness in life and in art. “Better to hold one’s hands to whatever warmth there is, to kiss and talk and grieve and fuck and hold tight against the whitening of the sky.” Is it possible both to be responsible in the face of the largest challenges and to honour the tiny possibilities for grace in love? Armfield stages this dilemma with great vitality.
There are many pieces of this portrait of motherhood, and at times Sandwich feels as cramped as a summer cottage. But that density is necessary to provide the full picture: of successful motherhood, of terminated motherhood, the beginning, the end, the in-between. Newman’s success is in delivering this treatise through an entertaining summer read, relatable to anyone who’s had a summer beach vacation.
“Parade” ultimately reveals itself to be the work of the same genius of the “Outline” trilogy and “Second Place,” one of the most exacting, terrifying novelists working today. “Parade” is either a guide or a warning. How thrilling not to know which.