Beauty Laid Bare: A Memoir
Beauty Laid Bare: A Memoir is the story of the first twenty-seven years of my life, ending with my mother’s suicide. I began this project more than thirty years after my mother’s death, as an attempt to write a memoir on her behalf—or so I told myself. It seemed less self-indulgent to tell myself I was writing my mother’s memoir, and not my own. But it’s mine, through and through.
I am writing about the quality of resilience. From the relative safety of my current age and place in the world, I can look back on the life of the child, adolescent and young adult, Lisa, and see how her choices and successes and failures were in response to a desire to live a creative and connected life, and to transcend the pain and emotional isolation of her family life. It is also my desire to write with compassion and understanding, to the extent that I can, for every member of my family—even Lisa!—which requires that I show them in darkness and in light, in their strengths and in their weaknesses.
I also wanted to write about a New Orleans Jewish childhood in the late 50s and 60s, the background of first and second generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and include cultural references and events to bring this small period of time in a particular place to life.
There are a couple of quotes that seem to always accompany me, and they fairly well state the themes I’m writing about. One is Tolstoy’s, “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
And, of course, the title of my memoir comes from writer Annie Dillard:
“Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize our days, will illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage, and the possibility of meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so that we may feel again their majesty and power? What do we ever know that is higher than that power which, from time to time, seizes our lives, and reveals us startlingly to ourselves as creatures set down here bewildered? Why does death so catch us by surprise, and why love? We still and always want waking...”