Hi lovely readers! It's almost September, and I for one am thoroughly not ready for summer to end but just as thoroughly sick of trashy summer novels with as many plot holes as pages. As an antidote, here's the first of two wonderfully written nonfiction books, with lots of white space on the pages and simple but powerful words.
(edited by Smith Magazine)
I Can't Keep My Own Secrets came into my life at the perfect time: About a week after attending a writing camp (one of our assignments was to write our own memoir in 6 words) I went to a library booksale, and pulled this book out of the corner of a plastic crate. I nearly started jumping up and down in the middle of the hordes of book-hunters (which I do quite a lot, actually).
So many of these 6-word stories were my own life, written by someone else. Quite a few inspired plots for novels and short stories, and although a few were rather cliche, most of these eloquent lives with small word counts are quite beautiful enough to write in sharpie on your wall.
I've found reviews that complained about the lack of depth of the memoirs, (i.e., "My weird elbows make me special") for a few lines and then conceded that they're written by teenagers who haven't lived a full life, so the shallowness should be expected. My response is 1., one can read more into "My weird elbows make me special" than just talking about elbows. I'm not going to get deep here, but you can often relate to what you chose. Other complaints included the mixture of happy with dark memoirs, making the more lighthearted seem superficial--this is true, but I didn't notice it while reading. The gradient of subjects was fairly gradual, and I enjoyed it.
This book is good in small doses. The intensity of each memoir can often provide minutes, if not days, of thought, as well as inspiration for any number of creative outlets. Don't read it all at once, please--not only is it best savored, but the different tones of the stories will resonate better if enjoyed separately.
I'd recommend it for ages 12 and up, although there's very little swearing--the subjects range from prom to drugs to teen pregnancy to getting kicked out of Wal-Mart to drinking to depression. Not only are many of these at least slightly inappropriate to more perceptive children, but they'll be more likely to identify with the implied backstories than younger readers.
