The Ninja Reader

...who has a hard time reviewing memoirs?

I mean, yeah, there are ways of reviewing non-fiction (essays, for example, are fairly straightforward as far as I'm concerned) but as far as memoirs go, I'm stumped. And yes, there is the bit where I'm trying to decide if the author is being self-aggrandizing and elevating their experiences above and beyond anything else, but what does it boil down to? Do I think a person's life experience is worth five stars or four? Or is it the way that it's been written?

Personally, I don't think I can write anything that Ceilidh's review on Bibliodaze hasn't said. It's a very powerful, very visceral work, linguistically dense and emotionally evocative. Strayed's journey, the lessons she learns retrospectively from it, are as relevant today as they were in 1995 - hanging your self-worth and identity on a single fixed thing is counter-productive, you need to trust yourself and adapt, you need to get on with things and stop thinking about them, etc, etc, etc. If anything else, it's comforting to see that the quarter-life crisis, as some news outlets contemptuously call it, isn't a new thing at all, and that self-doubt and insecurity are something that accompanies every young person's life.

In fact, if I may be allowed to digress: my generation (the Y's - Y Bother, Y Not, to quote from "Adorkable") is getting a lot of flak these days for being all lost and directionless and spoilt. We don't know how good we have it, apparently, that we don't live under the threat of a nuclear war or that we grew up in a stable economy that only now started to plummet (conveniently, when we're supposed to go out there and get jobs.) Recent graduates who haven't nailed a job at a big company's graduate scheme are regarded as lazy, and those looking for an alternative career are met with incredulousness and ridicule. UK politicians are happy to saddle university students with huge fees, getting us into even more debt, and not make enough jobs to meet the influx of highly qualified unemployed. 

Basically... we ask why the Y's aren't more grateful, and yet the Y's are not the ones with the power to change things. They need help.

When Strayed set off to walk the Pacific West Trail, she was undergoing a lot more personal crisis - the death of her mother and the dissolution of her family - and yet her journey has a little something that everyone in my generation can relate to: the feeling of being uprooted, directionless, confused, and all too proud to seek help. In the wilderness, hiking in solitude for long stretches of time, she has no choice but to trust - trust herself that she would survive, trust others to help her, trust the universe, and almost always her trust is justified. While she encounters some dangers along the way, she finds that the world is more caring than she thought, and she is able, in turn, to make herself vulnerable and make real connections with others. 

And that, really, is what it's all about.