A Brief Homage to Three Writers of Conscience and Consequence and Their Memoirs
By Donna Seaman
Creative Nonfiction Faculty
Memoirs range from chronological narratives to lushly meditative musings to sequences of linked essays. Memoirs that trace the roots of a writer’s calling illuminate both personal impetus and the lure of the realm that inspired their commitment to the writing life, be it artistic, scientific, civic, or some combination thereof. Bone Black (1996) by erudite and ardent critic bell hooks is an exceptional and indelible literary memoir. I recently reread this exquisitely concentrated account of hooks’ difficult childhood as part of my research into the reading life and I was struck all over again by how brilliantly hooks re-inhabits the psyche of her younger self as she was punished for being different and for loving books, which became her ladder out of the abyss. Hooks went on to write many seminal and mind- and heart-opening books about sexism, racism, trauma, community, “the truth of our essential humanness,” and love as “our hope and salvation.” Bone Black was on my desk on December 15, 2021, the day bell hooks died. I opened it once again.
Joan Didion passed away on December 23, 2021. Didion’s penetratingly observed, analytically lacerating, and stylistically breathtaking essays parsing the zeitgeist are veined with irony, pain, and anger. More overtly personal elements began to emerge more centrally on the way to her most intimate and widely embraced book, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), in Where I Was From (2003). In this deeply inquisitive, memoiristic family history, Didion, scrupulous and candid, aligns her ancestors’ journey West and settlement in California with America’s pioneer mythos and considers how this complex and troublesome inheritance shaped her point of view, obsessions, and investigations.
E. O. Wilson died on December 26, 2021. A biologist, world authority on the marvels of the ant world, controversial evolutionary theorist, and winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, Wilson performed the crucial feat of making science comprehensible, exciting, and meaningful to nonscientists. He also tirelessly and innovatively advocated for environmental preservation. Wilson always sought to evoke wonder and to celebrate our inherent connection to and love for nature because he knew that we must cherish the wild if we are to protect it from our rampant destructiveness, inadvertent and otherwise. In Naturalist (1994) he explains how he came to live his remarkable life of close observation, discoveries, writing, and activism.
We have lost three clarion thinkers and writers, but the eloquent and discerning voices of hooks, Didion, and Wilson will remain vital, enthralling, and enlightening. Their books beacons in the dark.