![]() ![]() ![]() This memoir tells the story of her California sabbatical as she recovers and remembers her past. A few days later, a young man crashes into her Volkswagen, leaving her with serious physical injuries to add to her emotional/psychological/ spiritual ones. In a recent interview with Barbara DeMarco-Barrett on the radio show/podcast Writers on Writing, Janzen expressed delighted surprise at the success of a book that details going back to her Mennonite family after the shock of her husband’s departure for a guy named Bob whom he met on gay.com. Rhoda Janzen has joined the latter ranks as a memoirist-comedienne with her first memoir, Mennonite in a Little Black Dress: A Memoir of Coming Home. A few - David Sedaris, Dave Barry, and Bill Bryson - aim to make the reader laugh out loud and do so artfully. Many of today’s best memoirists - Mary Karr, Jeannette Walls, Anne Lamott, and Michael Perry, for example - season sad or ordinary narratives with humor. The story we have to tell may be dark or light, but the reader will enjoy it more if the tone contains elements of humor and if its tragedy is undergirded by comedy. This same trajectory can be the source of comedy. Showalter Humor and Memoir: Seven Ways to Leave ’em LaughingĮvery life contains the ingredients of tragedy: we are born, we suffer, and we die. Post #41 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Matilda Butler and Kendra Bonnett ![]()
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