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The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as Bildungsroman: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as Bildungsroman (view source)
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{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>'''Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as ''Bildungsroman''}} __NOTOC__ | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>'''Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as ''Bildungsroman''}} __NOTOC__ | ||
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{{Quote box|title=''In Another Place With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer''|By [[Susan Mailer]]<br />Northampton House Press, 2019<br />316 pages Cloth ISBN-13: 978-1937997977<br />(USD $27.95)|align=right|width=25%}} | {{Quote box|title=''In Another Place With and Without My Father, Norman Mailer''|By [[Susan Mailer]]<br />Northampton House Press, 2019<br />316 pages Cloth ISBN-13: 978-1937997977<br />(USD $27.95)|align=right|width=25%}} | ||
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Finally, what the reader truly appreciates is that the author has not permitted these painful memories to exclude the possibility of a correlative salutary imagination. To the contrary, it prompts her creativity to stimulate the expansion of a clearing for possibilities and potentials. The impressive characteristics, and there are many, of the author’s memoir reside in her discovery of the possibility of negating the adverse effects of frequent parental absences. She does so by placing herself ''in another place'' that we call imagination. Salvation resides for her in this god-like attribute of our human psyche to create a place for the intellectual and imaginative capabilities to develop. Almost in its entirety, her memoir deals with periodic separations in its different modalities and the haunting symbolic legacy of ineffaceable distress. Yet she gradually learns how to transform her life by acts grounded in imaginative freedom and responsibility. | Finally, what the reader truly appreciates is that the author has not permitted these painful memories to exclude the possibility of a correlative salutary imagination. To the contrary, it prompts her creativity to stimulate the expansion of a clearing for possibilities and potentials. The impressive characteristics, and there are many, of the author’s memoir reside in her discovery of the possibility of negating the adverse effects of frequent parental absences. She does so by placing herself ''in another place'' that we call imagination. Salvation resides for her in this god-like attribute of our human psyche to create a place for the intellectual and imaginative capabilities to develop. Almost in its entirety, her memoir deals with periodic separations in its different modalities and the haunting symbolic legacy of ineffaceable distress. Yet she gradually learns how to transform her life by acts grounded in imaginative freedom and responsibility. | ||
. . . | As uncanny as it may sound, the author’s early sorrow carries in it its own antidote and intimates to her that salvation may well be attained or, at least, one might approximate it. Not surprisingly, she finds it again in language, not only in the alchemy of the “talking cure,” but a decision to become a writer. On the last page of her memoir, she tells us, “I wrote about us, my father and me, and while I wrote he came back to me again. His voice was reassuring, championing my step into new places.”{{sfn|Mailer|2019|p=300}} | ||
Acute consciousness of the magical role dialogical language plays in our life effectively assembles and structures the author’s instructive memoir as a narrative of various stages of learning of how to cope with the omnipresent vagaries and intricacies of life. She shares with her father the extreme desire to think creatively through the magic of language, and ideate or envisage the narrative field of lived new experiences—embracing a mode of high caliber dialogic epistemophilia. Her memoir is an account of a triumph over adversities, truly. I commend and recommend it to all those who, like myself, declare their solidarity with language as the very essence of our salvation. | |||
===Citations=== | ===Citations=== | ||