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A review by shirleenr
Ordinary Light: A Memoir by Tracy K. Smith
3.0
3.75/5
My rating reflects difficulty to get into Ordinary Light's first 200 pages., more a judgement on me than her contents. Tracy Smith divides her memoir into five acts. The beginning acts Smith devotes to her upbringing in California on military bases and then pre-Silicon Valley. Her final chapters are where Smith discusses college independence, cements her writing path towards poetry, and her mother's death from cancer.
I suspect my impasse is how un-poetic and densely expansive I found this work. I imagined a more poetic, sparse, experimental writing style. I recognize her honest, open, self-questioning and humble approach to this genre. Was that a problem for other readers ? When Smith retreats into elaborating about her thoughts in isolation, memories of her life as the youngest child of seven, and her P.O.V. baby in the family. That's where momentum drops. I lose my place and restart the book weeks later.
I am glad I stuck with this book, because how Smith grapples with her mothers final years while she manages somehow to finish college alone on the East Coast (Harvard), her pain and struggle felt more present. When she meditates on how writing a note to a professor "My mother is dying" makes her mother's terminal illness and impending consequences real to her, her memoir comes most alive and present to me. The final chapters Ordinary Light wrangle with a mother's religious devotion whose intensity her daughter doesn't share. The subsequent distance and guilt which intrudes into a mother-daughter bond I know well, and finally, the memoir's conflicts felt both immediate and universal.
My rating reflects difficulty to get into Ordinary Light's first 200 pages., more a judgement on me than her contents. Tracy Smith divides her memoir into five acts. The beginning acts Smith devotes to her upbringing in California on military bases and then pre-Silicon Valley. Her final chapters are where Smith discusses college independence, cements her writing path towards poetry, and her mother's death from cancer.
I suspect my impasse is how un-poetic and densely expansive I found this work. I imagined a more poetic, sparse, experimental writing style. I recognize her honest, open, self-questioning and humble approach to this genre. Was that a problem for other readers ? When Smith retreats into elaborating about her thoughts in isolation, memories of her life as the youngest child of seven, and her P.O.V. baby in the family. That's where momentum drops. I lose my place and restart the book weeks later.
I am glad I stuck with this book, because how Smith grapples with her mothers final years while she manages somehow to finish college alone on the East Coast (Harvard), her pain and struggle felt more present. When she meditates on how writing a note to a professor "My mother is dying" makes her mother's terminal illness and impending consequences real to her, her memoir comes most alive and present to me. The final chapters Ordinary Light wrangle with a mother's religious devotion whose intensity her daughter doesn't share. The subsequent distance and guilt which intrudes into a mother-daughter bond I know well, and finally, the memoir's conflicts felt both immediate and universal.