Rewriting damaged lives with eloquence and truth
How do you make sense of a damaged life? How do you re-create yourself when all the odds are against it? For me, being able to write about the fractures in my life got me through an earthquake of an adolescence, a ruinous first marriage, and a terrifying illness. Writing's got the ability to make sense of the darkness, to shape and control it so it doesn't seep into the present and cast shadows on the future. And that quality, for me, is part of why I'm pulled to memoirs.
The breathtaking ''A World of Light" (University of Nebraska, $24.95) is Floyd Skloot's sequel to ''In the Shadow of Memory." Fifteen years ago, Skloot was on an airplane when a garden-variety virus entered his system and ravaged his brain, creating a neurological calamity that compromised his memory and his motor and cognitive skills. His speech became a crazy quilt, and his IQ diminished by 20 percent. And even though he relearned how to walk, write, and read, today he remains damaged, struggling to find ''harmony rather than mastery" and to be ''at home in a shattered world."
Skloot writes with eloquence and humor about his struggle, but in this book he has more than himself to contend with. While Skloot uses everything he can -- diaries, lists, and other people's memories -- to paste together a semblance of his own missing past, his mother, Lillian, succumbing to Alzheimer's, cannot. But to Skloot's surprise, the disease has a rich and surprising reward, transforming Lillian from the nasty, bitter mother he endured into a loving, happy person who wants connection. Lillian no longer remembers biting holes in her terrified son's wrists or locking him for hours in a toy chest. Her memory of the times she phoned the local mental institution requesting a room for ''a bad little boy" have vanished. Instead, she exists purely in the now, delighted for her son's company, free of her rages, defensiveness, and moods. Her memory loss turns out to be a kind of blessing, a new and loving opportunity for family.
Skloot's memoir is constructed much the way his memories now work, moving back and forth through time, zipping from one subject to the next, and all the while creating indelible portraits of Skloot's life with both his mother and his supportive wife. Buttressing the story are fascinating details about how and what we remember, why emotionally tinged memories stay more powerfully in our mind, and how Skloot's writing keeps the virus that seems hellbent on quieting him at bay. ''The thing I had to do was write about the experience, refuse the silence," Skloot says. And here, he's done it brilliantly and with grace.
Joy Castro's ''The Truth Book: Escaping a Childhood of Abuse Among Jehovah's Witnesses" (Arcade, $25) doesn't have the evocatively lit design that Skloot's book does -- in fact its jacket looks hard and uninviting, all red and white with a black banner and capital letters, with a subtitle that sounds like a sociological treatise. But inside is an exquisitely powerful and beautifully written memoir.
Here, lack of memory isn't the real problem. Remembering is.
The ''truth book" is a text that contains the principles of the Jehovah's Witness faith. But the real truth here isn't religious tenets, but rather Castro's clear-eyed, unflinching depiction of the harrowing facts of her life. Castro, adopted as a baby by devout Jehovah's Witnesses, is fine until her parents divorce and she's left in the care of her irresponsible, cold mother, who quickly remarries someone described as a monster in religious clothing. Castro's stepfather mercilessly beats and abuses the whole family, she writes, and as Castro blooms into adolescence, she describes his sneaking into her bedroom at night to give her ''massages."
Castro's mother won't protect her kids. The church refuses to listen. Her stepfather mocks her urge to go to college even as he demands her participation in his sinister new hobby of photographing young girls. Castro's real father begs to take his children back, but her mother and stepfather forbid it, rewarding the kids' yearning to leave with vicious beatings, she writes. But even when Castro and her brother do escape and go to live with her father and his new wife, it's far from perfect. He's self-absorbed and materialistic, and prone to mood swings. His new wife's a reluctant and distant stepmother. And gradually, heart-wrenchingly, Castro begins to learn that if she wants a new life, she's going to have to create it herself.
Castro, like Skloot, moves effortlessly back and forth through memory, as she tries to ''feel my way into what it all means." Glimpses of her future spark and glint amid the rubble of her past, and she even imagines a richly evocative monologue from her heartbroken birth mother. Castro not only saves herself from her brutal childhood, she saves her brother. And when she has a son, she gives him the childhood she and her brother never had a chance for. Her son is doted on, never struck or scolded. ''Sweetheart, this is what you deserve," she tells him.
Gorgeous, disturbing, and grippingly alive, Castro's book offers the kind of hope her background never supplied. And it should be noted that part of the profits of the book are going to Childhelp USA, a national organization for the prevention of child abuse.
The past reverberates against the present. How then do we navigate and move beyond the damage in our lives? The first chapter of Skloot's book says, ''We're here now." And maybe that has to be enough -- that one moment, radiant with hope, where anything might happen to propel us forward.
Caroline Leavitt's latest novel is ''Girls in Trouble." She can be reached at www.carolineleavitt.com. 
