Book Review

Tamela K. Watkins
Memoir Review
Nov. 7, 2007

My 17-year-old son already thinks I’m an idiot. I talk too much and too loudly, and I’m prone to crying at embarrassing moments, like when he made his senior speech during the band competition on Saturday.
But he does understand the importance of humoring me at times, and he did that beautifully when I called him to my room two weeks ago to read my favorite lines out of the current book I was reading.
“Listen to this,” I cried exuberantly. He smiled. “She’s writing about one of her cats. Listen to what she says: ‘She hardens her gaze when she sees me, then bolts across the snow, an elegantly flung scarf’” (40).
He smiled again, a little less brightly. “That’s good, Mom.”
“Yeah, but wait. Listen to this one. Listen to how she describes wild turkeys. ‘I am always surprised to see them, sensing before they appear at the edge of the woods their great dark shapes – bundles of rags on stilts’” (59).
“Okay, mom. Is that all?”
See, he humors me. Sometimes he thinks I’m funny; sometimes he thinks I’m ridiculous; sometimes he thinks I’m sweet. It’s exactly the same way I felt about The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Birth Year by Louise Erdrich. The memoir is one of those books that you can’t decide if you love or hate. Depending on the mood you’re in when you pick it up, you may be totally enchanted by Erdrich’s descriptions of motherhood, particularly focusing on the first months being at home with a new baby. Or, if you’re in a different mood, you may despise the memoir, finding some of the more mundane subjects she covers so tedious you want to throw it under the bed and pick up the new Sandra Brown “trashy” novel instead.
Perhaps that’s the point of the whole memoir Erdrich writes: being a new mother has tremendous joy and spirit mixed with the everyday sameness that comes with being sleep-deprived and frustrated at another day not being planned by yourself, but instead dictated by someone else’s tiniest, loudest needs.
There’s a strange poignancy to the memoir because of the circumstances that surround the author. She writes often of her husband Michael and their three daughters; she even gives recipes of different meals Michael cooks for her and the family. She also makes a reference to their three older children, all adopted and suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome. As I was reading the first part of the memoir, something kept nagging at my memory; I knew I’d read Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club – which I loved – but her husband’s name, Michael Dorris, sounded familiar. Finally I googled their names – now I know why I remembered him. Years before – about five years or so after the writing of this book – allegations of abuse by Dorris had been made by Erdich’s daughters and by the three older children; Dorris committed suicide before the case went to trial. It adds a bitter element to the whole story; her complete love and respect for her husband that she shows in the book seems so out of place when you know the “ending” of the story. It made me uncomfortable.
Perhaps that’s one of the drawbacks of memoirs: do future events make what was written at the moment unimportant? Less beautiful? Less meaningful? If I know that James Frey has now admitted that much of his “memoir” A Million Little Pieces was “embellished,” does it make it worthless? If I know that the family that August Bourroughs writes about in Running with Scissors says much of what he wrote is made up -- even going so far as to sue him in civil court -- does that mean I can’t enjoy the book?
Those are difficult questions to answer. Maybe I would have liked The Blue Jay’s Dance more if I had not known the family history. Maybe not, since I often felt as if I were reading something written for a creative writing class rather than a heart-felt memoir. It was too fluffy – too much of “nature is beautiful” for my taste. The most touching moments, however, are when she talks about her children – and her cats! I love the cats. They felt real, with true behaviors and emotional reactions to events.
I’m not sure I would recommend The Blue Jay’s Dance to someone else; instead, I would be glad to show them the parts I highlighted. That would give them the essence – the rest is just fluff.