Scraping By in the Big Eighties/The Men in My Country

[May 11th, 2005] For a memoir to be successful, a writer must weave details from the past into patterns, making connections that become significant to both author and reader. Two recent memoirs published by university presses-Natalia Rachel Singer's Scraping By in the Big Eighties and Marilyn Abildskov's The Men in My Country-illustrate the very elasticity of the genre, as Singer filters historical fact through the prism of personal events, while Abildskov's writing springs from a lyrical impulse concerned with the experience of love and language.

Scraping By in the Big Eighties begins in 1980, when the federal government began dismantling public funding for affordable housing, the arts, health care and education. Singer considers how her poverty, her mother's madness and Reaganomics became inextricably entwined. The author's contradictory desire for security and a non-mainstream life becomes the book's narrative strength as well as its primary tension. "The plan was to get laid off, go on unemployment, and become laidback," Singer writes, "meanwhile training myself to write and publish the most important bildungsroman of the late twentieth century." The parallel stories in this memoir, one about Singer's unsteady relationships and unemployment, one about life at the tail end of the Cold War, amplify one another, mining the past as a warning for the present.

If Singer is akin to a documentarian, Abildskov writes like a poet. The Men in My Country is filled with visual, tactile and aural memories of the writer's relationships during a three-year stint teaching English in Japan during the early 1990s. Her memoir is an evocative meditation on the possibilities and limitations of language. When she falls in love with a lawyer who is enrolled in her adult English class, the very meaning of words begins to change. "In a few weeks," she writes, "he becomes the reason a new definition of travel emerges for me. Travel as seduction. Travel as education. Travel as a way to move to be moved." Love becomes another form of travel, another way out of the self. The strength of this memoir rests on Abildskov's passionate attempt to render, in words that can never mean exactly what we want them to mean, this desire for love-"to move to be moved." Mary Rechner