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so4reads 's review for:
Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots
by Deborah Feldman
I kept thinking about what Jeanette Winterson said about her autobiographical writing being fiction, how she herself becomes a character in the process of writing. Deborah Feldman on the other hand insists on the truthfulness of her account, and as I got closer to the end of the book, I began to understand why that is so important to her. The chapters are too fragmentary to be presented as The Truth, many of the characters and relationships remain only drawn in rough strokes, unexplored. Maybe the book would have benefited from a more in-depth exploration, a good 100 pages more. It is perhaps naive of me not to concern myself too much with the revelatory nature, as some critics have claimed, of her account. As it is, it works great as Her Truth, about 20 years of real life and experiences pressed into the format of a novel with everything that implies. I'm looking forward to reading the follow-up.