THE BLIND ASSASSIN by Margaret Atwood (Kindle)

Oh, this novel! The writing! The interiority of the narrative. The evocative description. The cool irony. The genius of layering three stories within the story. Iris and her younger sister Laura grew up without a mother. Their war hero father runs a factory in a small town in Ontario. When the Depression hits, the father loses the factory, and Iris is married off to Richard, an ambitious businessman, in the hopes of saving the family from financial ruin. Laura is in a relationship with a political radical who also writes pulp science fiction. The second story is the tale Alex (the lover) tells Laura, who eventually uses the story in her novel (is it her’s, though?), The Blind Assassin which is published posthumously. Much of the beef of the novel is in the memoir (third story layer) Iris writes years later as an older woman looking back on the tyrannies that made up the sisters’ lives. It’s a lot but so worth it in the hands of the marvelous Atwood. 

I’M GLAD MY MOM DIED by Jennette McCurdy. (Audible) 

Catchy title or a turnoff? Either way, McCurdy’s memoir about a childhood spent fulfilling her mother’s dreams will hold you transfixed at how she survived life with such a parent. She waited until her mother was dead to write about how awful and how funny she was—frequently at the same time. Her mother wanted her daughter to be a successful actor, and she was as Sam on Nickelodeon’s iCarly. She wanted her daughter to weigh 89 pounds, and McCurdy met that goal with anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia. She puts up with the mental and physical abuse from agents and television executives because her mother is proud of her success on the show, and to give that up would be akin to killing her. The mother dies eventually from cancer, and the reader isn’t too surprised that McCurdy, to the end, relays “that complicated truth—of having adored and feared someone, of missing them and being relieved that they’re gone.”

THUNDERCLAP: A MEMOIR OF ART AND LIFE AND SUDDEN DEATH by Laura Cumming (Kindle version)

I read Thunderclap while flying to Amsterdam to look at some of the art Cumming mentions in her memoir. I visited five museums in two days and saw the skaters on the pond on a cloudy winter afternoon in the 17th century. The light on the floor of a Dutch kitchen while a girl sweeps. Portraits by Vermeer and Frans Hals and the dark corners of Adriaen Coorte came alive from reading the author’s take on the histories of some of these artists. But the clap in Thunderclap is reserved for Carel Fabritius, the painter of The Goldfinch (yes, that one, revered so eloquently in Donna Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch) and of his painting, A View of Delft, the author’s favorite work of art. The Thunderclap was the sound made when a gunpowder cellar exploded in the city of Delft in 1654. The explosion killed Fabritius, and Vermeer narrowly escaped. The memoir jumps from these famous painters and their work to the author’s father, James Cumming, and the quiet epiphanies of his work. It’s a love story to both Fabritius and Cumming’s father and to the lasting qualities of their paintings.