FICTION | NONFICTION | POETRY
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All in What We're Reading Now
“The universe has been listening to my conversations, threading everything together. It began last April, when I picked up Swann’s Way for the third time in ten years. Each time it surprised me that the resonant moment everyone seems to know about — the moment when the narrator eats a madeleine with tea, and the aroma, the feel of it in his mouth, the motion of dipping and then bringing it to the lips, sets loose a slough of tender and animate memory — happens quickly, on page 60. Each time I’ve thought maybe no one else has ever finished this book either.”
The death of a parent, in most memoirs, would be the book’s beating heart. Initially, this also appears true of Mill “Town, a recent hybrid memoir by Kerri Arsenault. In a beautifully touching moment near the end of her father’s prolonged fight against lung cancer, her mother guides him to the kitchen, her arms around his waist. He’s weak, on oxygen, and having trouble sleeping. His appetite has withered to almost nothing, and he’s suffering the indignity of a catheter. As they slowly make their way down the hallway, he turns to his wife. “Ain’t much of a life,” he says.”
