Ghostbread by Sonja Livingston

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I’m relatively new to memoir, but I can hardly imagine liking one much better than I like Livingston’s Ghostbread. It’s beautifully written, beginning to end. The short sections (chapters?) seem a poetic hybrid of confessional lyric and flash creative nonfiction. These provided me with intense emotional experiences of both the highs and lows of family and poverty, of growing up amid the tensions of these, of searching for identity and belonging.

Almost everything detailed here is completely outside my experience. I grew up with not only a mother but also a father and a brother in Protestant southern Appalachia, in a lower middle class family (with lots of extensions) in the same house in which my mother grew up. And yet, I felt–I feel–an intense resonance with Ghostbread, which, first, suggests that at its core the memoir tells a deeply human story and, second, attests to the richness and power of Livingston’s writing.



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