This much madness is too much sorrow: Notes on Swallow the Ocean

I picked up Swallow the Ocean by my fellow MFA Laura M. Flynn at the Borders in San Diego.

After a preface which suggests the trouble to come, the book begins with a delicately observed evocation of childhood happiness. If you’re an impatient reader, chill: there will be plenty of drama soon.  A book which skipped the happiness would have been more gripping, but cheaply so. In the end, this memoir, which describes her childhood with her paranoid schizophrenic mother, caused me to fight back tears. 

Swallow the Ocean is also a book which takes both the moral and artistic challenges of memoir seriously and meets them successfully. To write a memoir is to judge others on the basis of our fallible and self-serving memories and the people we write about often have no rebuttal. This demands great scrupulousness. The book is both unflinching and forgiving. In cases where her memory is sketchy, Flynn simply asks her sisters and notes their differences.  I'm not sure why more memoirists don't do this.   

The artistic challenge of memoir is its necessarily double vision, which also seems nicely navigated here: She captures the lived sensibility of a child with the mature perspective of an adult. Frankly, the book kicked my ass a little bit.  I hope that I can write about baseball cards and tabletop hockey games the way she writes about dolls. 

I have tried to write about the role sugar played in my childhood, so I especially admire the treatment of it here.  I’ll quote a paragraph about Twinkies. When her mother left the house, Laura and her sisters would binge on banned sugar. She had already described fruit pies with a kind of hyperrealism, so you noted their serrations and heft:   

A Twinkie was the opposite of a fruit pie: its weightlessness was what made it desirable. Like all items of spun sugar–marshmallows, cotton candy–what was desirable in a Twinkie was its emptiness. Perfect and uniform in a way only a machine could achieve, only a child could love. Twinkies were all artifice and air. I bit in, Foamy cake. White fluff. There was a clarity to these foods, a reassuring neatness. Nothing murky, crunchy or unknown.

Comments

[Mandy]

What a great cover, too!

[Carolyn]

Nice excerpt. Sounds like a good book.