Braddy Reads Still Life with Oysters and Lemon

Back in college I took a course on creative non-fiction writing - a genre that sounded completely fake when I signed up for the class. Turns out it's FAR from a made-up genre, but rather a category of subjects, usually containing a blend of informational research and personal memoir. The two elements... don't always combine well.

I read once a book called Driving Mr. Albert, a truly bizarre account (and a truly true one, at that) of the man who stole Albert Einstein's brain. The author of the book met up Dr. Harvey, Einstein's coroner, and took him on a road trip across the country to return Einstein's brain to one of his living relatives. Along the way, they stopped in at several odd museums and made a side trip to visit and a beat poet or two. The whole thing comes across as rather forced. It's like the author thought of everything interesting he could possibly do with this premise and just went out and did it, even though no one, from Dr. Harvey to the living Einstein relatives, really seems like they want to be involved.

There's even one scene where the author is on the phone having an argument with his wife. He hangs up and describes how cool the metal of the payphone is against his forehead. In a novel, it may have been an effective scene. In nonfiction, however, and especially in memoir, it calls into question not only the author's sincerity in his research, but the very authenticity with which he lives his life.

And that's, like, the exact opposite of what memoir is supposed to do.

I'm just ranting now. I didn't come here to talk about Driving Mr. Albert, but I use it as an example to contrast with probably my favorite memoir ever, Mark Doty's Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. I'd read Still Life back in college and loved it then. I decided to crack it open last week to see how it held up. And it holds up beautifully.

Mark Doty, for those not in the know, is a top-notch poet, and he brings that same prowess with words to the pages of this super-brief but dense analysis of life and loss. Still Life juxtaposes Doty's love of still life paintings with the grief he feels over the loss of some of his more human attachments.

It's a lovely transcendental piece. Doty describes his favorite still-life paintings with such delicate and precise language that he makes me actually want to hunt these paintings down myself. He doesn't write in the present tense as though he were trying to affect some type of grandiosity in his living, but he reflects with serenity (and, yes, some sadness) on what has happened to him in the past - a far more effective tool than what I've encountered in other memoir.

I strongly recommend Still Life with Oysters and Lemon to anyone looking for a lovely little read. At only 70 pages, it goes pretty quickly, and it's well worth the time spent on it.