Book Review Interrupted

How a memoir shook my memory bank and aborted my review

I missed the launch party of a book I read recently. I’d planned to Zoom in but forgotten I’d signed up to read at a local open mic night. That launch party was important to me because I’d been working on a review of the book, Map of a Heart by Jacque Gorelick. I was planning to pitch it to Hippocampus Magazine until I saw they’d already published this great interview with the author by Morgan Baker.

One thing I loved about the book was the personal memories it dug out and set free from the place those memories lurk. In this case, despite the fact that the book is about the author’s excruciating days in an intensive care waiting area, my memories were mostly happy ones.

Long, long ago, in the early 1980’s I worked in the cardiac cath lab at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The job included being on call. That often meant coming to work in the middle of the night, sometimes working straight through until the following evening. I was young then but still, it took lots of old, thick coffee with that awful powdered-chemical creamer to make it through those shifts. Most of us, the cardiologists included, smoked. But in spite of, or perhaps due to the often stressful circumstances, my colleagues and I formed close relationships.

Reading Map of a Heart, I remembered the day the first automatic internal cardiac defibrillator (AICD) was tested in a human body. I remembered the day so clearly, but when I went to Google to check the facts, I found I was wrong. The patient I remembered, the one I thought the first recipient of the AICD was a teenage boy. It turns out the first was a middle-aged woman from California. How could I have such a clear memory of that boy? The packed observation area, the tension as his heart was deliberately sent into a life-threatening arrhythmia, the hoots and cheers, tears and grins as the device did what it was designed to do. What skeptics said it could not be trusted to do. All that happened, but it was months after the first. Where did THAT memory go? It would have been as monumental.

EKG strip presumably from first recipient of AICD https://suddencardiacarrestuk.org/2018/09/the-invention-of-the-icd/#:~:text=The%20First%20Implant,the%20AICD%20on%20the%20floor!

Are you wondering, “Where is she going with this?” What’s this got to do with book reviews?

After going down so many rabbit holes, I ended up not writing more than a three sentence Amazon review. But I liked the book. And those Amazon reviews, regardless of what you think about Jeff Bezos, are important, especially to a debut author.

But this story is more about memory, and how unreliable it is.

Not long ago, I heard my husband tell a story about the day almost two decades ago when our newly adopted dog took off chasing a deer. How he saw the flash of the deer’s white tail just seconds after letting Sugar off leash to practice Sit/Stay commands so she could earn her good citizen dog diploma.

Sugar in her post-deer-chasing years

It’s agreat story. Short and funny. The only problem is, it’s MY story. It happened to me and I’ve told it so many times my husband imprinted on it. He knew I was there and listening, so it’s not that he was being deceptive. He incorporated my memory and made it his own. We share lots of good memories of Sugar. It’s a year since she died and we still talk about her all the time.

My son, after reading one of my personal essays once said, “That’s not how I remember it, Mom.” Well, of course not. Daniel will have to write his own version.

Siblings, too, often have very different recollections of the same event. But this is what makes memoir one of my favorite genres to read, knowing that it’s one person’s account of a story, while always wondering how the other players would have written it. It’s also what I enjoy about writing memoir. Sifting through memory, excavating the long-buried fragments and putting them together like those dinosaur bones wired into a whole creature that may turn out to be a fantasy beast compiled from several real ones.

My ToBeRead list of books is long and daunting. I may never read them all. I may not finish some. But Map of a Heart was a compelling read and also a reminder of how something as simple as learning CPR may save a life.