In these days of memoir-as-suspect-literary-form, it’s interesting and downright exciting to read Kate Braverman’s memoir, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles. Braverman is not a writer who tiptoes around her topics; her novels Lithium for Medea and The Incantation of Frida K are revelations for readers, works by an author who experiments not at all self-consciously, but wildly successfully, with the written form.
The same is true of her memoir. Rather than a chronological “so this is my life” approach, Braverman’s book is a series of essays, told mostly—but not always—from her point of view. In her swirling, hypnotic language, she reviews her years of life in Los Angeles, growing up in less-than-desirable neighborhoods, a youth that could have driven many others into lives of failure and despair. And yet, in spite of the hardships, Braverman survives, thrives, and eventually moves to the east coast with her family. Her essay about moving east, to a home that provides privacy and history and reestablishes the nature of family, seems like the ideal escape—yet a few years later, disillusioned by the collapse of the mythic view of her new life, Braverman and her husband return to the west coast.
But Braverman doesn’t tell her story just from her viewpoint. Two essays are told by other family members, and one is told via an interview with Marilyn Monroe. The family voices are brassy, aggressive, and bitterly funny, as shown by the excerpt from “Uncle Irving’s Advice:”
“They couldn’t invent a past with a single exception to impoverishment. I used to ask, ‘Do we have anyone of distinction in our family? A rabbi? A doctor? A learned man or woman anywhere in our family tree?’ No. ‘How about a guy who owned a store with leather goods? He sold shoes and boots, maybe?’ No. Just centuries of people with genetic trauma, curled up in rocky crevices of the Carpathian Mountains, waiting to get raped, looted, hung, drawn and quartered, imprisoned, conscripted, and tortured. I’ll tell you how poor these people were. They thought a candle and a potato was a good time.”
The in-your-face voice and narrative construction leads to the conclusion that memoir at its best is less concerned with literal facts—no matter what current controversies might say—and more concerned with emotional facts. Braverman’s interpretation of her family background, of her life in LA, of who Marilyn Monroe really was, says as much, if not more, about her as a person and a writer than a straightforward retelling of facts could ever do. And it makes for much more enjoyable reading.
