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Jan
12
Just Read It: I JUST LATELY STARTED BUYING WINGS by Kim Dana Kupperman
2011 at 5am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Published June 2010 by Graywolf Press
Okay, so the title is a mouthful, but Kim Dana Kupperman’s I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is well worth the trouble. And trust me, there will be trouble, because after just a few pages of this wonderful collection of personal essays, you’ll be dying to recommend it to everyone you speak to. Just ask Jenn, whose ravings first alerted me to it.
Kupperman’s collection, for which she won the Bakeless Prize in 2009, is creative nonfiction at its shining best. In these “missives from the other side of silence,” she presents carefully crafted personal reflections that are packed with thoughtful insights and are mercifully clean of the flash, embellishment, and sensationalism often associated with memoir. Kupperman recalls a childhood defined by her mother’s mental illness and her parents’ protracted custody battle, the details of which remained a mystery to her until her father’s death, and she does a fine job of acknowledging her life’s less-than-perfect moments without succumbing to the kind of self-indulgence that is all too common in work of this genre.
My mother had lived on the edges—poverty, depression, having to be an adult before she completed childhood—and she died knowing their sharpness.
Kupperman begins with a discussion of her mother’s death, circling back to her childhood later in the collection, and the circuitous, non-linear organization of her pieces creates a full portrait of her life and resembles the loosely associative nature of memories, which we change with the simple acts of recalling and remembering.
Comments on the writing life appear throughout the text, as Kupperman recognizes that she is always an observer, separated ever so slightly from the action taking place.
I did what I always do when faced with a potential memory: I chose the strangest part and cataloged its fragments.
But make no mistake—Kupperman puts distance between herself and her subjects, and her writing is spare, but it is far from cold. She is observant of but intimately connected to her subjects, and she draws sympathetic but warts-and-all portraits of the individuals who populate her world. And she does it beautifully, saying a former lover “looks like someone you’d need a key to open.” As with most writing, it is all in service of understanding herself and making sense of how she came to be who she is.
Almost ten years, and already I understood that an act of writing might alleviate guilt, help me work out some interpersonal problem, or make peace, if not with someone else, at least within myself.
Many of the pieces in I Just Lately Started Buying Wings are about family and history and the need to make connections with the places we’ve come from. Kupperman uses an essay about traveling to Russia “on a kind of ancestral errand” to discuss the fall of the Soviet Union, and she imagines herself into the consciousness of a battered woman to explore domestic violence. It is this ability to make her work about more than herself, to position her life within the larger frame of social and political events, that elevates Kupperman out of the realm of memoir and gives her work enduring weight and presence.
You won’t regret spending a few hours with this marvelous collection which promises great things to come from Kim Dana Kupperman.
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A few hours? That is it? Sounds like a no-brainer to me.
Sandy´s last [type] ..Today Im at the Scene of the Blog!!!
This looks wonderful — I love the bakeless prize!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Rebecca Schinsky. Rebecca Schinsky said: Just Read It: I JUST LATELY STARTED BUYING WINGS by Kim Dana Kupperman http://bit.ly/gMCHH1 [...]
Am hooked already! Thank you for an excellent and tantalising review.
I haven’t been reading much non-fiction these days but definitely want to change that. This sounds like a different, worthwhile read!
Meg´s last [type] ..Wordless Wednesday- National Air & Space Museum in Chantilly- Va