Review by New York Times Review
At their worst, there's little to distinguish poorly conceived memoirs from the kind of thing better suited for a mental health professional. At their best, memoirs burn through the "me" of the genre, and into the universal of the human experience. Those masterly memoirs are rare: Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" comes to mind. "Anything that works against you can also work for you once you understand the Principle of Reverse," Angelou tells us in that debut autobiography, thereby generously bestowing her readers with the precious key to her own liberation. In other words, a beach read offers escapism; an excellent read offers the means to escape. Enter, then, into my reading nights this dark winter season three memoirs written by women who have in common their gender but little else. Gallingly, none of the works rise very far above this special-interest corner; they're neither sufficiently escapist for beach reads, nor sufficiently wise to offer the means to escape. "If you don't like something, change it," Angelou famously advised. "If you can't change it, change your attitude." Of the three memoirs under review here, the most successful - by which I mean the one that does the most to reach beyond itself - is Reema Zaman's "I Am Yours." Zaman, raised in Bangkok by a Thai mother and a father from the ruling classes of Bangladesh, is both privileged enough to receive an education and female enough to have that education compromised by the usual means. When a teacher stalks Zaman, everyone, including her father, dismisses her objections. "Power only responds to power. I have none. The predator is protected. I am a stain, initially irksome, ultimately forgotten," she writes. Still, Zaman doesn't turn cynical or bitter, just increasingly anorexic. Zaman can write beautifully about the frustration and pain of being a woman in a man's world, an immigrant in a world suspicious of outsiders. In the States she finds not only the promise of liberation, but also its opposite. A colleague rapes her; a man she has trusted. She decides to keep the assault to herself. "I cannot jeopardize my chances at staying in America," she explains. "I'm profoundly American. I'm independence, grit and freedom of speech, personified. Staying here is crucial for the life I want, to be a voice for those without one. The irony is acutely painful." Still, a glorified journal is confined by the limits of its own scope. Zaman's writing seems to have inspired her - she tells us so - but it's too navel-gazing to inspire the reader. "I have lived a startling, beautiful life. I have survived and continued not because of confidence but because I have a confidante. Call thyself any name thou wish. Imaginary friend, art, muse, reader, guardian angel, higher self, inner voice, God_You, myself, this, we are a truth." Zaman's memoir is merely good, but it's streaks ahead of Sophia Shaimiyev's "Mother Winter." Shaimiyev has a lot to say: She is a Russian immigrant to America, the daughter of a lost alcoholic mother and a dark, abusive father. But what she says she says with so much I-am-womanhear-me-roar abandon, it was all I could do not to avert my gaze out of delicacy for her, if not for myself. "That night, in bed with my boyfriend," she writes at one point, "I felt a certain kind of desperate passion - like a cheetah attacking a water buffalo - amplified by him being monotone and withholding." Cheetahs and water buffaloes don't exist in nature together, for a start. Still, not 30 pages later we're told: "A rhino hunted for its ivory runs in fear of captivity. She knows not whether the gun pointed at her from the chopper is to kill her or is a stun gun to knock her out and take her to safety." Rhinos have horns, not ivory. These are pointless, sloppy sentences, and they highlight the central problem of this book. Shaimiyev has plenty of genuine self-concern, but beyond herself she seems capable of thinking only in stereotypes ; she can't see beyond her own suffering let alone get her readers there. "What if the name of the town and country you were born in changed after you left? What if you lived in three different countries within a year right before you hit puberty?" This reader's response to that rhetorical question is: It's the memoirist's job to figure out those basic questions, and then write us your considered answers. Which brings me to Pam Houston's regrettable "Deep Creek." It's ostensibly the story of the lifesaving properties of her high-elevation ranch in Colorado, although there's not much to cultivate up there in the long winters except, apparently, self-delusion and acres of self-satisfied contradictions. Houston begins her narrative by telling us, in her introduction, that she's "happiest with one plane ticket in my hand and another in my underwear drawer. Motion improves any day for me - the farther the faster the better." She ends the book by recounting her boat trip through the Fury and Hecla Strait. "I was face to face with my familiar koan: how to be with the incandescent beauty of the iceberg without grieving the loss of polar bear habitat." She's learned nothing, in other words, between the first pages and the last. In the meantime, however, we learn that social media too makes Houston grieve: "Facebook has already made me cry four times this morning," she writes roughly a third of a way through a tedious missive. "First it was Ursula Le Guin reminding me we don't write for profit, we write for freedom; next it was a video of the Unist'ot'en indigenous camp resistance trying to stop the Keystone pipeline; and then it was the state of Nevada electing a man to their house of representatives who said 'simple-minded darkies' show 'lack of gratitude' to whites." The social and environmental injustices that reduce Houston to tears are no accident; they're a fairly widespread global arrangement in which many of us are wittingly or unwittingly complicit. Houston has always wanted to be "a child of the wilderness," she tells us, but she's now an elder; it's time to do the hard work of connecting the dots between cause and effect. She might, for example, have scrutinized the roots of racism and indigenous American resistance in and around her beloved patch of barbedwired-off paradise. She might have told us what she herself was doing to combat this climate change she so laments. That would have been the beginning of a decent, possibly instructive memoir, or at least something beyond these sleepy musings. ALEXANDRA FULLER is the author, most recently, of "Leaving Before the Rains Come."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
Artist and writer Shalmiyev's many-faceted memoir is an exploration of heartache and the ways life moves on even after irretrievable changes. We gather through snippets of shared information the texture of her 1980s childhood in the Soviet Union and how, in the custody battle between her parents, she lost her mother when the authorities agreed with her father's contention that he was the better parent. At age 11, Shalmiyev loses her mom again, even more wrenchingly, when she and her father emigrate to the U.S. This is an elegy for lost mothers and lost homes and a consideration of the complexity of national and religious identities and gender roles. A feminist framework underpins a narrative peppered with references to Western art and literature from ancient to modern times and extended by many thoughtful detours. The author's own apparently dueling instincts as a mother and writer are examined with unflinching forthrightness. Interestingly enough, Shalmiyev's description of poet Mary Ruefle's work as poignant and casual also captures the spirit of her own remarkable demonstration of public introspection.--Shoba Viswanathan Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this bold if uneven memoir, Shalmiyev, former nonfiction editor for the Portland Review, writes of being a motherless Russian immigrant, addressing the woman who "left me for the bottle long before my father took me away to America." Stitching together lyrical essays, fragmented narratives, and critical commentary, she reflects on "Elena. Mother. Mama," whose absence led her to seek "surrogate mothers for myself: feminists, writers, activists, painters, ballbusters." Loosely linear with discursive asides, Shalmiyev shares memories of her mother's drunken promiscuity, her own neglected childhood raised by an enigmatic father, and their emigration from Leningrad to New York in 1990. After her arrival in America at age 11, the narrative becomes more chronological and focused. Shalmiyev describes her college years in Seattle as a sex worker; a fruitless trip to Russia to find Elena; and her subsequent marriage, miscarriage, and role as mother; she intersperses these accounts with musings on art, feminism, Russian history, and the work of Pauline RAcage, AnaA_s Nin, and Susan Sontag (whose son was raised by his father, "purposefully, unlike my mom, so that she can think clearly and write"). Shalmiyev's prose can be brilliant, but at times overreaches ("Father never got wintery feet" instead of, simply, cold feet), and the book's ragged continuity stalls any momentum. This ambitious contemplation on a child's unreciprocated love for her mother trips over its own story, resulting in an ambiguous, unresolved work. Agent: Jamie Carr, WME. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Shalmiyev's first book carries readers to an apartment in Russia, where a little girl lives with an alcoholic mother, to the streets of Italy where a 12-year-old refugee washes car windows, to a peep show in Washington State where a college student works to pay bills, and Portland, OR, where a loving wife writes and cares for her children. During all stages and places of her life, Shalmiyev longs to reunite with her mother, even though a Russian court deemed her mother unfit. At times, the author fears she's becoming like her mother. At other times, she embraces the woman's party girl persona. Indeed, this narrative is of how her mother's alcoholism robbed Shalmiyev of her childhood and impacted her adulthood. VERDICT Despite flashes of brilliance, the writing is uneven with many asides and inordinate word choices. The book is best in its open, raw, reflective, and intimate moments. Readers willing to tackle serious issues of gender roles, displacement, parental neglect, and sexual assault will be ecstatic to discover a writer who unabashedly shares her story.-Beth Dalton, Littleton, CO © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A feminist nonfiction writer's memoir about growing up between two cultures and her search for the mother from whom she was separated as a child.When she was young, Shalmiyev's Azerbaijani father took her alcoholic Russian mother to court. A judge declared Elenawho was so addicted she drank cologne when she didn't have vodkaan unfit mother, estranging her from the family. Her father spirited his daughter away from Leningrad "without a goodbye" to Elena just before the fall of communism and immigrated to the United States. Settling in New York, he married a Ukrainian woman who followed him from Leningrad. The teenage Shalmiyev developed an interest in feminism and female artists such as Sappho, Doris Lessing, and Kathy Acker, among others. Throughout, the author interweaves references to these figures among the impressionistic vignettes that comprise the primary narrative. She also recounts the days in her early 20s when she worked as a peep show stripper among women "caustic with mocking sarcasm, not having any of IT." With Elena never far from her thoughts, she also secretly wrote letters to her mother in English as a "process of mourning my mother [and]what she did and did not provide me in life." Shalmiyev then returned to Russia to look for Elena only to find that she could not locate her mother anywhere. She continued living aimlessly after that, indulging her penchant for parties and "loud and raucous night[s] that ignore[d] the nuzzling rays of daylight." When she finally married, it was with trepidationnot just for the end of her "party-girl" days, but also for a life of settled domesticity. Shalmiyev knew it was in her just as it was in her mother "to leave [her] children[and] make them unhappy." Ultimately, though, she chose a path that tested her ability to nurture and forgive. A rich tapestry of autobiography and meditations on feminism, motherhood, art, and culture, this book is as intellectually satisfying as it is artistically profound.A sharply intelligent, lyrically provocative memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
