The Memory Palace is an autobiographical book of poetry by JoSelle Vanderhooft. Vanderhooft is more typically known as an author of fantasy poems, short stories, and reviews, published in magazines including Star*Line, Cabinet des Feés, and Goblin Fruit. Reflection’s Edge has published five of her short stories; click here to read. Vanderhooft has also written extensively about religion, gender identity, queer studies, and mental illness. The Memory Palace deals with these themes within a personal account of her childhood and college years—a time which encompassed her parents’ divorce, her father’s suicide, the onset of her own clinical depression, and the otherness of living as a Catholic lesbian in a world of straight Mormons.
It’s hard to review a book as personal as The Memory Palace, perhaps because the author’s act of trusting us makes us want to protect her. Disclosure poetry isn’t exhibitionism, exactly – neither a reality-show confessional nor a rush of TMI. Vanderhooft draws on the tradition of confessional poets like Sharon Olds; she writes not to be absolved or applauded, but to say, “this, also, is the experience of life. Look at it for no other reason than that it is true.”
As with any autobiography of an author, it is tempting to psychoanalyze. When Vanderhooft writes poems like “The Alien Girl Goes to Cape Cod,” one can ponder whether she genuinely felt as though she came from another planet, destined to rejoin her true family in the sky, and whether this influenced her later writing choices. In the end, however, this investigation into causality is not only unsupportable in the face of limited evidence, but misses the point, limiting the experience of both the poem and Vanderhooft’s stories. More interesting from a genre perspective, although it is not the poem’s main thrust, is the way Vanderhooft casually name checks Star Trek and The Twilight Zone with no less weight than To Kill A Mockingbird.
Slipstream is joining the mainstream. It happens sometimes, cyclically—decades when the genre ghetto is just another neighborhood. It’s called geek chic now, and linked to the economic rise of the Internet, but we’ve been here before. In the mid-1800s, Romantics like Byron, Shelley, and Rossetti wrote popular fantasy and horror poems, Arthurian legend ruled pre-Raphaelite paintings, Thomas Bullfinch’s The Age of Fable was standard reading for intellectuals, and Jules Verne was the equal of authors like Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Georges Sand—many of whom shared his publisher. In the 1970s, Vonnegut ruled the literary and genre lists, “Frodo Lives” was a common and un-ironic catch phrase, Star Wars broke box office records, and Led Zepplin could sing about wizards without endangering their status as red-blooded hard rockers.
Yet, somehow, these periods of tolerance end, boundaries come back up, and geekery regains its status as a maligned subculture. It’s hard to remember now that as recently as fifteen years ago, the shields between genre and literature were firmly erected. Trekkies were so common a source of derision, they became the subject of a popular “look at the weirdos” documentary and defensively insisted they were really Trekkers. An attempt to revive Doctor Who failed miserably. Non-genre books by genre authors could not find publishers. Every literary magazine listed in Writer’s Market went out of their way to insist: no science fiction. No fantasy. No horror. Often in italics. Genre was kids’ stuff read and watched by social misfits—even relatively popular genre works like Buffy or X-Men.
Today, Return of the King has won best picture. Top literary prizes go to genre-bending authors like Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and Nicholson Baker. TV critics have nothing but praise for shows like Battlestar Galactica and Pushing Daisies, Anna Paquin won a Golden Globe for her work in Tru Blood, and Lost is a prime subject of water-cooler discussion. Poems with geek references are making their way into Best American Poetry, are courted by avant-garde magazines like POOL and The Hat, and are embraced by mainstays like Subtropics and Poetry. We’re not weirdos right now; we’re normal.
It is in this context that The Memory Palace makes its true weight known—at least in the ways that make it appropriate for a Reflection’s Edge review. The Memory Palace says the most about genre by not emphasizing its author’s genre background—by treating its genre influences as neither more nor less important than Vanderhooft’s other cultural experiences. It is remarkable simply by the fact of its existence; in some other years, Vanderhooft would be barred from writing anything so personal, so literary, and so devoid of dragons. As she writes in “Mom”:
We’re never given everything we need.
Bed canopies, the proper pegs for chairs,
hinges, even, for a simple hope chest -
these things, all of them, come later
only through hard work or chance,
and sometimes not at all.
To buy a copy of The Memory Palace, click here.