Today, May 3rd, is the third discussion question for the Beyond Busy Global Monthly Book Club. We just finished Anne Lamott’s Some Assembly Required, A Journal of My Son’s First Son and now we will spend seven days discussing it. Anyone who has read the book can participate by commenting.
Our next book selection is the hot-off-the-presses Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel. You can join our public BBGMBC Facebook group, if you would like to join us in reading one excellent quality book per month and then discussing it here.
Some Assembly Required, A Journal of My Son’s First Son is written by Anne Lamott with Sam Lamott and published by Riverhead in 2012.
Grandparents do not seem to often get to take center stage in memoirs…is this true?
Prior to reading this book, this book club read Wild by Cheryl Strayed.
Some Assembly Required is also a memoir, although the form of the telling is quite different, since it is titled as “A Journal of my Son’s First Son.”
In Wild, Strayed stays in complete control of what is told, what is not told, how the story is told, and what to tell when. Nobody else’s voice is allowed in.
In Some Assembly Required, Lamott takes the risk of allowing the point of views of others into the telling of the book, although, we must assume that she acts as gatekeeper of those voices.
Compare and contrast the two ways of telling a story. Which did you prefer and why?
If you have ever tried to write memoir and have encountered the challenges therein, feel free to share your experience.
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I preferred Strayed’s method, but perhaps that was because the story was more engaging. I thought Sam’s viewpoint in SAR was interesting but it left me wanting to know Amy’s viewpoint as that triangle of realtionship seemed so critical to Anne.