mother mary comes to me

[illuvium]

i've been better about reading books lately (yay), so i recently ended up finishing the memoir "mother mary come to me", at a friend's recommendation. i really enjoyed it! i thought that roy's writing was very fresh and clean without coming across as too simplistic. unfortunately, i'm not her real target audience; it's a very personal memoir (naturally), and i didn't understand the references made to lots of historical events since i felt that some of them were a bit targeted towards her specific region (again, totally understandable). i think the most compelling part to me, and also the part that roy herself focuses most on, is her relationship with her mother (and really all of her family, but her mother in specific). i admit that i saw a lot of myself and my own relationship with my mother in her memoir, and i specifically adored roy's threads throughout the book, like with the organ-child phrase. i think she's such a clever writer, and i'm so glad that i ended up reading the book. earlier last year or this year, i read a different memoir, by alan cummings, and i truly disliked that, since i felt that it came across as just. a very imbalanced blend of bad events, which i do understand as being part of his own life, of course, but i thought that it just wasn't an interesting book. there wasn't anything particularly compelling to it; the writing fell flat, and i never ended up feeling much of anything except for the token owed sympathy when someone tells you about bad things that have happened to them. that didn't happen here; i felt a genuine connection to roy and i laughed and cried at the book, especially the ending. there's not much of a moralistic lens you can apply to an actual memoir, so there's none of that this time: i just thoroughly enjoyed roy's writing and the details of her life. i did also feel that her life was a lot more interesting than mine, but that's half the fun of it, too, i think.