MEMOIR

Alex Lemon

Feverland: A Memoir in Shards

Milkweed Editions

Paperback,  978-1-57131-336-2, 312 pages, $16.00

September 2017

Reviewed by Si Dunn

Imagine that your entire life can be viewed, frozen in place, in one big mirror. Now, drop the mirror. Let it shatter and scatter into countless pieces. As you pick up some of the fragments, one at a time, write down what you see in each piece and try to make it connect somehow with the next piece you lift.

Associative. That’s the easiest adjective to describe the structure of Fort Worth writer Alex Lemon’s latest memoir. (His previous works include Happy: A Memoir and several poetry collections.)

Feverland: A Memoir in Shards jumps quickly from one time, place and memory to another memory that is somehow connected. And each biographical “shard” may consume one short paragraph or a page or several pages.

Initially, the book can be challenging reading. But it soon becomes rewarding. Lemon understands the power of using short, clear sentences to build toward deeper meanings. At the same time, he does not shy away from using longer sentences (sometimes very long) to alter the rhythms and flow of thoughts.

One moderate example: “At night a whirlwind of voices racket through my head and sleep is impossible and I feel an unstitching begin in me, an unraveling of my stories, of myself.”

Lemon’s memories reflect many places, including California, Iowa, Minnesota, Katmandu, and Texas, and he touches—often with dark humor—on a wide array of topics, from brain-stem surgery, to marriage and parenthood, to John Wayne movies, to crying easily, to self-mutilation, to dealing with Norway rats and racists, and to sadness that his child someday will have to deal with the “backwardness” that is “still swaggering around” in the Lone Star State in the twenty-first century.

“But,” he concedes, “deep within, I think that a part of me loves this, this fact that disaster is always with me. That my bones are somehow lined with cravings for doom, sharp-edged dread, self-immolation, and violence. They bubble up jubilant and unseat me from the world in the precise seconds that most demand I be present, that I pay attention.”

Many of Lemon’s absorbing memory fragments lead ultimately to thoughts of how we make peace with, or at least grudgingly dwell with, our own pasts. We all have experienced bad and horrifying moments or situations. Most of us also can recall wondrous moments we wish had never ended.

Feverland eloquently reminds us that we all build our lives from shards: what we experience, what we learn, what we love and hate, what we hope for, and what, ultimately, we are willing to recall.

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