Such a Life

Martin's latest book (after From Our House) is a collection of essays exploring family, memory, the act of writing the past, and the author's childhood and adolescence in Southern Illinois. "What did I know then of the noise our living makes?" Martin asks in the subtly moving "Colander," a meditation on his relationship with his mother and her pronunciation of the titular utensil ("I thought she said calendar"), which caused him to mistake her voice for that of his aunt. In "A Backward Spring," Martin draws a profound parallel between the bizarrely hard winter of 1830 that ruined a season of crops in the town of Egypt, Ill., and his mother-in-law's Alzheimer's, which makes Martin "determined%E2%80%A6 to be kind to her" in her inability to remember. In "Who Causes This Sickness?" he ruminates on his father's loss of his hands in a farming accident, and his own health issues, as a way of investigating the integrity of the narratives we impose on our experiences: "It's the story I told myself then, not knowing that there was another narrative running beneath it." Indeed, though his latest may be just one iteration of many possible tellings of his life, Martin's honest and well-paced prose makes the repeated attempts feel fresh, and most of all, worth it. (Mar. 1)