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An occasional selection of published book reviews by Emily Fox Gordon |
New York Times
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"A Memoir by the Daughter of Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly" published August 6, 2016
"Nadja Spiegelman has written a richly detailed memoir about the contradictory life narratives that connect and divide four generations of women on her mother’s side. The paternal line had already been documented: Her father is Art Spiegelman, author of the classic and magisterial graphic novel “Maus,” based on his family’s experience of the Holocaust. The reader can’t help noting that this must have been a hard act for Nadja to follow: Fat-shaming and other mother-daughter cruelties look small next to the horrors of genocide..." For full text |
New York Times
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"The Lost Landscape by Joyce Carol Oates" published September 18, 2015
"Joyce Carol Oates is an ambivalent memoirist. In “The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age,” she repeatedly expresses her doubts about first-person autobiographical writing. For one thing, she’s deeply wary of the confessional voice. For another, she has little faith in the reliability of memory. While she can vouch for the accuracy of “A Widow’s Story,” her 2011 account of the aftermath of her first husband’s death, which she based on contemporaneous journals, she can hardly back up this latest memoir with documentation. No small child, not even a Joyce Carol Oates, could be expected to take notes all day." For full text |