Ordinary Paradise a Memoir

Laura Furman's "Ordinary Paradise" will touch anyone who has ever suffered loss, and will be almost as meaningful to someone who has been lucky--thusfar--to have escaped loss. Furman herself, a novelist with a spare yet poetic style, paces her memoir with all the narrative skill of someone who knows how to tell a story: what to say, and what not to say. Although the story deals with the central event in her life--the death of her mother from ovarian cancer when Furman was thirteen--it never succumbs to tearfulness, narcissism, or any form of self-indulgence. It takes a cold and sober look at life. As she admits at the very start, this is not a story with spine-tingling events: "Nothing out of the ordinary happened. My father did not molest me. My stepmother did not send me into the woods with a hired killer." This is not the stuff of tawdry daytime tv shows. Instead, it is about the loss of ordinary family happiness and the hard-won effort to piece together a whole life after decades of family repression and denial. The paradoxical title tells us much: all paradises are eventually lost, but some can be re-gained. The best ones are those that allow us the freedom and the happiness to live, love, and grow under perfectly ordinary conditions. These are the conditions of happy family life, and it is to Furman's credit that although fearful of the same fate her mother met at an early age (we now know much more about the genetic predisposition of some people to cancers) she has been able to achieve the "ordinary paradise" that for decades she thought she would never have. She has won it through common sense, good luck, persistence, clear-headedness, patience and labor. She has made art out of her life, and made of her life a work of art.