I could tell you stories - Patricia Hampl

One of our most elegant and thoughtful memoirists reflects on memory and imagination. Memoir, that landscape bordered by memory and imagination, has become the signature genre of our age. In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl moves back and forth between a series of story-like recollections and essays in which she considers how she has been "enchanted or bedeviled" by autobiographical writing --her own and that of others. Subjects engaging Hampl's attention are her family's response to her personal writing; a secret that an old Czech Emigre tries to confide in her; reflections on reading Whitman during the Vietnam War; the ethics of writing about family and friends; and the experience of reviewing Anne Frank's diary. In a wholly original conception of Sylvia Plath, Hampl --recalling her review as a young person of Ariel --writes her way out of the confines of memory and into the expansive province of the imagination. "A writer is first and last a reader," she says, and makes it clear that, for her, reading is a passion not a pastime. The word that unites the impulse within all the pieces is "Remember!" --a command that can be startling. For to remember is to make a pledge: to the indelible experience of personal perception, and to history itself.