Braddy Reads A Girl Named Zippy

Considering how little I care for memoir, I sure do read a lot of it. Guess that's what being in a book club is all about. So, yeah, someone ELSE decided that I'd be reading Haven Kimmel's A Girl Named Zippy. Wasn't my choice.

Memoir often strikes me as self-indulgent. "Look at my life!" shouts the author. "Isn't it just literary?" And I definitely think that there's a healthy dose of that here. But, really, does that make the book bad? I think you'd be hard pressed to find one novel whose author wasn't something of an exhibitionist while writing.

An additional problem I have with memoir is that I often find it difficult to react to. Admittedly, since my initial impulse is to pretty much hate everything, I'm choosing my own fate here. I mean, it's certainly upsetting to an author to find out that someone hates their characters, but as long as those characters are fictional, it's hard to take that personal. But with memoir, if I hate a character, I'm basically just telling the author, "Hey. I hate your dad."

Kimmel deals with a lot of themes here - faith, family, social mores - yet she never seems to draw a firm conclusion on any of them. She doesn't believe in Chrisitianity, yet she admires and emulates her Christian friends. She seems to both love and hate her sister. She recognizes that she causes her own problems by refusing to follow societal rules, yet she never changes her behavior to avoid suffering. Is it fair for the author to bring all these points up without leading the reader to a firm conclusion? Maybe not, but it's probably not fair for the reader to demand didactic morality from the author's life, either.

Maybe that's what I hate about memoir - it's too often as messy and un-satisfyingly open-ended as real life. Seriously, I have enough messes outside the pages of the book. I don't need my reading material to jack up my mindspaces.

All that aside, A Girl Named Zippy is a good read. Taken separately, the vignettes from the author's life are charming and amusing, and she's got just the right sardonic voice to pull them off in writing. As a whole, the book leaves you with a lot to think about. It's definitely successful as what it is, and if you like memoir you'll like this too.