Mark Doty: Firebird - A memoir

By PETER WELLS

Don't we always want it back, a little, the old life we've run away from?" Mark Doty asks in his beautifully succinct and evocative memoir.

At one time memoirs were the preserve of ambassadors, generals and people who had lived lives of public note. By now, the memoir has been appropriated by anyone with a story to tell.

Just as reality television altered the boundaries between what is acceptable in public and private, so the memoir has turned inwards to the psyche of a private individual who wishes to examine her or his life in public. In some senses, this makes the memoir a quintessential contemporary art form.

"Held to the light of common scrutiny," Doty notes, "nothing's ever quite as unique as our shame and sorrow would have us think. But if you don't say it, you're alone with it, and the singularity of your story seems immense, intractable."

Doty's story isn't singular (but then perhaps the lesson of all memoirs is that nobody's life is). He was brought up in America in the 1960s; his rebellious sister had abortions, went to prison; Doty found he was gay; his fragile mother drank herself to death. These are the barest facts - the bones, you might say, over which Doty clothes the flesh of his story. And it is the flesh - the telling, the poetry of diction, the sharp insights into universal behaviour - which gives body to this memoir.

Doty has won nearly every award possible in the States. He is a notable poet. Some people will reject this book as having nothing to do with them. Yet as Doty points out: "What you don't allow yourself to know controls and determines."

It is a subtle portrait of the nuclear family under stress as much as a portrait of an emerging, perceptive self.

"What matters," he writes, "is what we learn to make of what happens to us."

Doty, in this memoir, makes quite a lot.

Random House

$27.95