Matilda Butler
Women's Memoirs
Aug 1, 2008 at 6:15 PM

Hi All: I just finished reading Alexa Wolf's mother-daughter memoir, My Mother's House, A Memoir. I read many memoirs, always looking for content and craft that will help my women's memoir students.

Wolf has mastered how to turn a memoir into a page turner.
Let me give two examples. Wolf writes at the end of one chapter:

"But it was the incident with the snake that commenced a nightmare whose imagery summed up my entire inner life and predicted, to a degree, my outer life to come. The whole thing was about love. That's why it impacted me so powerfully."

Then, on the following page with a chapter title of The Snake, Wolfe continues:

"I was an infant when my mother and father gave me a Siamese kitten and nine when my allergy doctor told Mother I had to give him up. I lost my best friend of all, my feline sibling, and the doctor forbade me any other animal with hair, fur or feathers. But one day when I was twelve a neighborhood boy caught a garden snake. I stroked its back with my forefinger while it wound itself around the boy's hand. Sensing an intelligent if alien life pulsing through the reptile, I was certain that if I had a snake, it would know me and, in its own snaky way, love me."

At the end of the snake chapter, Wolf writes: Somehow, I was going to be happy. Life was opening up. I felt a tremendous excitement although the snake nightmares persisted; and I still had that nose."

I ask you, "Could you close the book at that point?" Heck no. Now I needed to find out about 'that nose.' On the following page, with a new chapter title of Dumbo, I read:

"Long Nose, Big Nose. My father's nose. If only I'd inherited his wavy black hair instead." And once again, I am engaged in reading this next chapter.

Wolf's content, a story of an emotionally abusive mother and eventual reconciliation combined with a story of medical disasters, will speak to many people. Many of us, with aging parents or parents who have already died, know the struggles of dealing with doctors, hospitals, emergency rooms, nursing homes, and, sometimes, even hospice care. Wolf, in telling the story of her mother's unsuccessful struggle against all these forces, is often telling our story.

If you are looking for a book on this topic and if you are interested in how she crafts a page-turner memoir, then you'll want to check out: My Mother's House by Alexa Wolf.