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Reading requires you to surrender not only to the narrative, but to how that narrative is told. Surrender to the form of the story. This is the thrill and the pain of being a reader. To put it another way, a reader is the backseat passenger to an author's construction. That journey, to which one implicitly consents by embarking on readership, is alternatively pleasurable and tortuous, and very often a mix of both.
The reader's journey, once surrendered to, is deep and stunningly memorable in Richard Brockman's autobiographical novel Life After Death: Surviving Suicide. We call his book a novel, which implies fiction, because as Brockman points out, what one remembers is not veridical. Memory is selective, reflects what was reinforced (“Neurons that fire together, wire together”) (p. 22), and is reworked with each act of retrieval. Thus, every memoir aimed at transporting its reader to another space and time is part fiction and part historical truth. The good thing about autobiographical novels is that our inner skeptic, the one who screams this couldn't really happen, is quieted because the work is based on an actual life story. Brockman authentically plants that story in the Brooklyn of his childhood amidst the eccentric characters of his Jewish family, the allure of the pier on Sheepshead Bay, the bustling excitement of Lundy's restaurant, the punishing ride of the Cyclone at Coney Island, and the familiar street names: Ocean Parkway, DeKalb Avenue, and the Belt Parkway.
Judith L. Lewis, Professor, UVM Larner College of Medicine, Vice Chair of Education and Director of Resident Psychotherapy Training, Department of Psychiatry, University of Vermont Medical Center (UVMMC). UHC Campus, 1 South Prospect Street, Burlington, VT 05401.
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Grace E. Andrews, Psychiatry Resident, University of Vermont Medical Center Psychiatry Residency Program.
The hard thing about this genre is that it activates a reactive part of us that screams, “Don't le