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A review by amymo73
The Lost Landscape: A Writer's Coming of Age by Joyce Carol Oates
5.0
Some books hit you at the right time. Or you pick them up at the right time. I'm not sure which it is, but that was definitely the case with this memoir from Joyce Carol Oates. I've known about Joyce Carole Oates my whole life. How could I not, growing up in Lockport (not quite her native city, but close enough) and longing to be a writer myself. I have not read many (any?) of her novels and find myself drawn more to her short stories and non-fiction. That being said, I was excited for the opportunity to read her memoir of growing up in the same general area I did a few decades before me.
The memoir is rich with stories, of course, but also rich with feeling. Regardless of where you grew up or when you grew up, she examines the landscape of her childhood which drew me into examining my own. I found myself recalling long drives with my parent, the activities which drew me close to them and childhood/college friends whose lives intersected with mine and left huge imprints on my world view, even if I don't fully comprehend how.
Through her own stories, she weaves some powerful thoughts on memory and how we all construct, or reconstruct, our childhood.
Also, Joyce Carol Oates uses plenty of sentence fragments and inserts explanations/digressions in parenthesis which is so very much how I write I feel a kinship with her on the page. A very distant kinship (as I never became the writer I so longed to be) but a kinship nonetheless.
"We learn our awe of the world as children staring eagerly out the windows of a moving vehicle."
"What is vivid in memory is .. not routine but what violates routine. ... The fact is -- We have forgotten most of our lives. All of our landscapes are soon lost in time."
"We are all in dread that we will be loved less if we are revealed to be flawed -- surely sometimes that dread is not misplaced."
"In life, we don't see the shadows of things-to-come. It is always high noon, and we are likely to be blinded by such brightness."
The memoir is rich with stories, of course, but also rich with feeling. Regardless of where you grew up or when you grew up, she examines the landscape of her childhood which drew me into examining my own. I found myself recalling long drives with my parent, the activities which drew me close to them and childhood/college friends whose lives intersected with mine and left huge imprints on my world view, even if I don't fully comprehend how.
Through her own stories, she weaves some powerful thoughts on memory and how we all construct, or reconstruct, our childhood.
Also, Joyce Carol Oates uses plenty of sentence fragments and inserts explanations/digressions in parenthesis which is so very much how I write I feel a kinship with her on the page. A very distant kinship (as I never became the writer I so longed to be) but a kinship nonetheless.
"We learn our awe of the world as children staring eagerly out the windows of a moving vehicle."
"What is vivid in memory is .. not routine but what violates routine. ... The fact is -- We have forgotten most of our lives. All of our landscapes are soon lost in time."
"We are all in dread that we will be loved less if we are revealed to be flawed -- surely sometimes that dread is not misplaced."
"In life, we don't see the shadows of things-to-come. It is always high noon, and we are likely to be blinded by such brightness."