Are You Happy?: A Childhood Remembered

Emily Fox Gordon may well become known as The Great American Memoirist for ARE YOU HAPPY? A Childhood Remembered, and her previous memoir MOCKINGBIRD YEARS. To read these books is to spend welcome time in the warm and brilliant company of a deeply insightful writer. ARE YOU HAPPY? invites us into the compelling story of Gordon's childhood that is at once shockingly personal and universal. She reveals a psychic landcape, an event in our cultural consciousness, a deliciously discerning expose of family life, the fifties, parental love and failure. Her awareness of herself and the world is so evolved that the book unfolds as an exquisite map of individual consciousness, the "socialization" of that, and the brave refusal to limit one's imaginative life and primordial communion with the world. She writes so well that I read many of her sentences over and over to savor them, and in fact savored the entire book. Gordon has a true gift for writing of profound emotional conflict with empathic clarity. This is a book I value most of all for its wry introspection and moments of awareness that explode in revelation. It's not only about a childhood but the self in all its pain and luminosity.

This wonderful book tranforms incidents that we can all identify with into brilliantly captured observations about life. I am struck by the book's honesty and Ms. Gordon's ability to inject an aura of mystery and intrigue into the incidents she recalls with such lucidity. It's a great read, very moving in its simplicity and yet filled with Proustian overtones, giving the book its strength and power.

In the post-Frey era, it's refreshing to discover a memoir that reflects the ways in which memory really works. Are You Happy? delights with loose chronology and fleeting images, like the balloon glimpsed after the child has let go of the string. Yet the book is grounded by scrupulous attention to detail, with attending sounds, tastes, and fragrances that fully realize each hovering miniature. Here, one understands the author carefully scrutinized the past not to recite a history, but to evoke and describe a state of being, embracing the privilege, and one of the goals, of the memoirist: to make art of the past, as would a painter, or a musician improvising on a theme. Highly recommended.