Half a Life
By Jill Ciment
Crown, 224 pages, $23
A Message From God in the Atomic Age
By Irene Vilar
Pantheon, 336 pages, $23
Vertigo
By Louise DeSalvo
Dutton, 288 pages, $22.95
`My handwriting seems to be going to the dogs. Perhaps I confuse it with my writing,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary of 1920. More than 70 years later, artistic self-deprecation still plagues the diaries and memoirs of contemporary women writers. Three recently released memoirs explore this idea of suspicion about one’s own art and worth: “Vertigo,” by Louise DeSalvo, noted Virginia Woolf scholar; “Half a Life,” by novelist Jill Ciment; and “A Message From God in the Atomic Age,” by Puerto Rican writer Irene Vilar.
Published in the wake of such popular memoirs as Susanna Kaysen’s “Girl, Interrupted” and Mary Karr’s “The Liars’ Club,” these memoirs examine similarly chaotic childhoods and young adulthoods, and return repeatedly to three themes: distraction from despair, responsibility toward family, and negotiation with the world through writing. Often the goals become linked, but the methods diverge. DeSalvo ruminates, applying a scholarly scalpel to the complex layers of her life; Ciment immerses herself in the action of her youth, zipping through the scenes as if riding in her “lipstick red” midget MG; and Vilar provides compelling insights into the troubled politics of her native country, but only vague renderings of her own sense of displacement in the world.
As young women, all three authors learned to escape hopelessness through distraction. In “Vertigo,” Louise DeSalvo describes how, as a 16-year-old in 1958, she viewed the famous Hitchcock film 11 times in one week. Through it, she realized connections between her reckless attitude toward love and her propensity to faint when faced with the intimation of catastrophe. Jill Ciment also strove to escape her chronically tense home; as a teenager in the ’60s, she drew upon her artistic powers, changing her handwriting to match the personae she created for market research surveys. Irene Vilar’s first retreat came at the age of 19, when she withdrew into the stories of Chang Tzu after being checked into a New York psychiatric hospital. While there, she dwelled upon the life of her grandmother, a notorious Puerto Rican radical.
Distractions spawn creative work in these memoirs, and creativity becomes more necessity than outlet. Louise DeSalvo still keeps a notecard tacked above her desk with the saying: “The opposite of depression is not happiness but vitality.” Next to this talisman, she says, is another: a water-stained, arrow-shaped piece of cardboard with the words YES YOU CAN inked in enormous black letters. In “Vertigo,” DeSalvo investigates the literal and metaphorical gaps in her background. Her memoir chronicles her World War II-era days in an Italian, working-class family in New Jersey, the suicide of her sister, the crippling depression of her mother, DeSalvo’s own depression and the development of her scholarly work. “Vertigo” is, as she says, the “unlikely narrative of how a working-class Italian girl became a critic and writer.”
In “Half a Life,” Jill Ciment also struggles with the burden of her family, particularly her father, whom she describes as “petrified of spending money” and prone to rages that could only be extinguished by working obsessively in the garden and ignoring the family for days. Years later, while estranged from her father, Ciment married an artist 30 years her senior. In one startling scene, the two men nearly meet. When Ciment glimpses her father at an L.A. mall, she sends her husband ahead and shadows her father on her own:
“Taking a surreptitious glance around, he dug out a scissors, grabbed the fern by its shaft, and snipped off a cutting. I did a double take. My father was helping himself to mall plants. I watched him filch a cactus bud, another fern frond, and something viridescent and prickly. All the while I ached to make contact, to talk to him, say something.”
Irene Vilar also longs to better understand both her father, a renowned philanderer, and her mother, a lifelong depressive who committed suicide in 1977 by leaping from a speeding car. Irene, who was then eight, reached from the car and tried to stop her. That futile attempt proves symbolic; her mother’s suicide is part of a difficult political legacy that continues to haunt Vilar. Her mother’s mother, Lolita Lebron, was imprisoned for 37 years after firing at the United States Congress in 1954 on behalf of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Movement.
When Vilar was 15, she left Puerto Rico for Syracuse University, keeping in mind the maxim: “Mother is nation.” Not long after, Vilar was committed as a suicide patient to a psychiatric hospital, where she floated in and out of lucidity, alluding to haphazard relationships and mysterious pregnancies. Her disorientation echoed the religious visions of her grandmother, who, when imprisoned, claimed to hear a divine voice instructing her to write “Mensaje de Dios en la Era Atomica,” the Spanish translation of the memoir’s title.
Less ethereal voices guide the memoirs of DeSalvo, Ciment and Vilar; inspiration springs from memory and the attempt to reconcile myth with the narrative process. DeSalvo credits her success as a scholar to her ability for “backtalk,” a skill she developed as a child during World War II, when her father left for service along with the other men of their Hoboken neighborhood. In the men’s absence, the women congregated, listened to their children, treated them as companions, and “engaging conversation became a high priority.” Later, DeSalvo employs her ability to critique and transcribe–her last book published before this memoir, “Conceived With Malice,” focuses on the concept of “literature as revenge.”
“Reading, and writing about what I have read, have saved my life,” says DeSalvo. The result is, as a student once told her, “You never miss a thing.” This circumspection, so critical in her scholarship, has triggered pain in her life. Her scholarship offers equal diversion and reckoning. In her work, she has noted several unexpected similarities between her own life and Virginia Woolf’s: DeSalvo’s sister killed herself as did Woolf; depression riddled both DeSalvo’s and Woolf’s family; and both DeSalvo and Woolf survived sexual abuse. (In one of the book’s most effective scenes, as DeSalvo researches the effects of incest on Woolf’s work, she is transported back to a summer in her own childhood, when an aunt molested her repeatedly.)
While DeSalvo meditates and reflects, weaving narrative from incident and insight, Ciment paints a vivid collage of her life, including family, Los Angeles, New York and her procession of unconventional jobs. Money, like affection, was scarce in her family, so Ciment began as a youth to earn money in creative ways. Her unlikely positions ranged from market researcher and dog walker to nude model for the Escapade Modeling Agency in the Garment District of New York. Despite the nature of her jobs, Ciment remained resilient and resourceful. Though she never graduated from high school, she gained admittance to Cal Arts in part by enlisting her brilliant friend Rachel to take the SAT for her. The scheme worked, and Ciment later earned her bachelor of fine arts degree.
Ciment’s memoir benefits from tight, candid sentences that convey the grittiness that has propelled her. She is part conniver and part bewildered passenger. She prizes, above all, mobility and independence. Her rare admissions of vulnerability ring true; like DeSalvo, Ciment does not seem to request pity or approval from the reader.
Vilar struggles more with the idea of audience, and the relationship between excessive disclosure and a catharsis. “There are things you have to mention without fear so they won’t return again, or won’t surprise you if they do,” she says. A sense of horror and inevitability pervades the book, but at times Vilar seems unable to pinpoint its sources. She muses frequently about her grandmother and mother but gives her own life too superficial a treatment.
Vilar’s youth may account for her narrative’s unevenness; the book chronicles her life only until the age of 21, and she is mulling over relatively recent events. In her insightful preface, written at age 26, Vilar inadvertently raises the question of whether she has reached the minimum age for a memoir writer: “Like many a woman of my age, I was living a life of intuitions, I was growing up, I was in need of distance, which at eighteen is difficult to come by.”
