Volume 55, Number 14 · September 25, 2008
'The Knife by the Handle at Last'
By Tim Parks
Alfred and Emily by Doris Lessing
by Doris Lessing
Harper, 274 pp., $25.95
Apples and Oranges: My Brother and Me, Lost and Found
by Marie Brenner
Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 268 pp., $24.00
House Rules
by Rachel Sontag
Ecco, 261 pp., $24.95
Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father’s House
by Miranda Seymour
Harper, 270 pp., $24.95
The Sum of Our Days
by Isabel Allende, translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden
Harper, 301 pp., $26.95
The family memoir gives structure to old emotion and scattered recollection, allowing its author to take control of the past. Perhaps particularly for women writers, it offers the opportunity to turn the tables on oppressive patriarchal hierarchy. At some point, all five books under review portray male presumption as fragility, not strength, and celebrate the erstwhile victim's authorial power: to write the story is to have the knife by the handle at last.
Review, 4227 words
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