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Memoir Quest (TM) continues.
Thank zeus for the Seattle Public Library, because if I'd bought the last batch of memoirs with my own cash, I'd be mad about the stack of half-read tomes lying around the house.
Including:

• Lipstick Jihad
• Going Solo

I'll admit it, after Didion I took a break and read some Lee Child. Jack Reacher is a literary gem and always features some damn fine writing to boot.
Both the memoirs (unlike Reacher) had prologues, of a sort. Still, completely unnecessary. I skimmed and then skipped.
I only made it through about 3 chapters of Lipstick Jihad. The writing approach felt like a long look down memory lane, hastily translating the scenes even though I hadn't quite focused on what was happening. I wanted more immediacy. I wanted to feel the incongruity and fear and loveliness of being an Americanized Iranian in Iran. I'll probably just re-read Persepolis.
Going Solo is the second half of Roald Dahl's memoir. On a previous reading, I was intererested in the scenes in Tanzania and around East Africa. What I hadn't remembered was the embedded, casual racism towards most Africans. No surprise, but unpleasant reading. I forged ahead to the battle scenes, as cinematic and powerful as any cold-eyed war movie.
So much killing and fighting and dying and here we are again with Nazis in the streets. Deplorable!

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I've been reading memoirs in preparation for--well, I don't like to say what for, so suffice to say I'm delving deep into the world of memoir. It's a genre I've mostly avoided, in part because the form reminds me of testimony time at church, back when I was a kid, and as a born-and-raised p.k. let me tell you, I've heard puh-lenty of maudlin tales. I'm also no fan of sappy endings, everything has a reason narratives, or true-love-conquers-all kind of quatsch.
Exceptions to my strict no-memoir rule have been: Katharine Hepburn's Me, and Agatha Christie's An Autobiography, both life stories related by iconoclastic females who succeeded by being themselves, ignoring or subverting the male gaze, and looking, as far as I can tell, to impress no one. So I'll definitely re-read those.
In service to research I've read, mainly courtesy of the SPL in the past couple of weeks:

• Autobiography of a Face
• All Over But the Shoutin'
• Boy
• The Year of Magical Thinking

The first three books had forewords, which I usually skip but in light of this being a research effort, I read. I still don't get the point. Why write a foreword to say: "I wrote this book." I mean, obvs! Let's get on with it! Skip.
I couldn't finish the Rick Bragg book. The dialect, or more precisely, the good-old-boy prose rhythms, really bothered me. His mom sounded courageous but a whole book? Not for me.
Boy I've read many times, and it's more a collection of anecdotes, than a proper memoir, but I enjoyed Dahl's easy prose and vivid scenes. For me it added up to a tale of a European childhood no longer possible, the genesis of so many classic and beloved books. And yet I remembered as I read that, per his daughter and ex-wife, Roald Dahl grew up to be a less than kind and generous human being.
Didion's book is a real gut punch, beautifully written of course and a perhaps unintended window into the Writerly Classes I've always feared and yet somehow envied their LA/Upper East Side/Hawaii circuit.
So, the reading continues.
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Also, keep an eye here for fiction news in a couple of weeks. A story I've loved and been shopping around has finally found a home.