June 25, 2020
Yesterday while watching F. clean-up before we left her grandparent’s house. Grandma passed colored blocks asking F. to name them before she placed them in the container. At first, grandma alternated colors. Then she passed F. five purple blocks in a row preceding each with the same phrase:
“What’s that one?”
And each time F. replied, “purple.”
Then grandma passed F. an orange block.
“What’s that one?”
F. looked over her shoulder at me and back to grandma. She was thinking (a visible act in a toddler).
“Purple.”
At Fry’s a man on a scooter stopped for coffee. He had pop-country playing on a blue-tooth stereo bungied to his backpack. Emanations of his utopia.
Why does Thanh’s narrative seem dead while in Conroy’s everything lives? I wrote like Thanh, encountered the same problems, and answered with the same failures. I should study the book as an opportunity to study my own work from the correct distance.
Q – Why did you write a memoir?
Therapy is a motif, and so with my own life and is that the answer to the question?
Like me she knows what her memories mean and recounts them in scene but with all meaning dictated. This diminishes the realism she strives for.
