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“I Was One of My Memories does one of
the things that I love most about the thing we call creative
nonfiction: it shows us its thinking, its flawed and idiosyncratic and
completely delightful thinking. It is a thinking shaped by experience,
pleasure, grief, and disappointment, while the diverse forms, the small
essays, little animals of the mind, might be read as recursive attempts
toward sense making. I also really love Laurie Blauner’s sentences.
Sometimes they are absolutely strange and otherworldly, like Clarice
Lispector’s sentences (“I pry what happened before from what happens
next. / Borders and countries are changes in light. / I presume nothing
has a happy ending. / Something is dangling from a cloud’s mouth.”)
Sometimes, as in Suzanne Buffman’s Pillow Book,
the sentences are deadpan and hilarious because they are true (“My
husband is patient and I am not. He has long toenails so he won’t get
ingrown ones. He likes old things, including me.”) I just realized I Was One of My Memories
does another thing that I love most about creative nonfiction, that is
actually something I need from creative nonfiction in particular: it
makes me want to write. I toggle between the manuscript and a blank
page that I gradually fill with my own sentences. Which is to say I
feel like I am participating with this manuscript, I feel like we,
Laurie and I, or at least her persona, are having a conversation. I am
deathly allergic to her cats, but, oh how I enjoy the warmth of reading
them.”
--J'Lynn Chapman, Pank Contest Judge
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“I love this book’s fragmented and looping storytelling, its sense of humor, and its amazing, strange, and smart sentences.”
--Caryl Pagel, author of Out of Nowhere into Nothing
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“...so strange and true, structurally organic, surprising and moving.”
--Polly Buckingham, author of Expense of a View
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