Just finished reading Neal Cassidy's rambling memoir "The First Third". It's the story of his people. It's the story of his childhood. The first is the prologue written in a simple straightforward manner worthy of Hemingway, and the second main portion of the book is written in a style he patterned after the French writer Proust. As such, it takes a little getting used to. In telling the story of his childhood thusly, he takes lots of liberties on drawing conjectures and making observations regarding the meaning behind his actions and experiences that no child of 6 or 7 or 8 would likely have done at the time. But that is not the purpose of memoir. Memoir doesn't deliver unencumbered reality, it offers a biased recollection that contains a skeleton of truth wrapped in the idealized flesh of the heart's eye.
The body created here is one of amazing humanity and gives one a picture of a world and a life hard to image but all too real.
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