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Title: Inventing Memory
Subtitle: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters
Author: Erica Jong
Narrator: Melissa Manchester
Format: Abridged
Length: 6 hrs and 15 mins
Language: English
Release date: 07-27-16
Publisher: Phoenix Books
Genres: Fiction, Chick Lit
Publisher's Summary:
In the year 2005, Sarah finds herself drawn into the tumultuous lives of her unconventional ancestors. She calls to memory her great-grandmother Sarah, propelled by a Russian pogrom to America in 1906; her grandmother Salome, who cavorted with Henry Miller in pre-war Paris; and finally her mother, Sally, a famous folk singer and emblem of the 1960s. Through the paradoxical nature of memory, Sarah comes to understand and impart her own story.
Inventing Memory recalls the saga of the 20th-century woman and her heroic struggle to be free.
Critic Reviews:
"Melissa Manchester's performance as matriarch Sarah Solomon reveals her command of an authentic Yiddish dialect. Manchester pours high energy into the interpretation of these women, waxing her performance magnificent!" (Audiofile Magazine)
Members Reviews:
Excellent condition/nice paper back
Very moving story - I wanted my own copy to read and re-read. Thank you for a timely & very positive transaction
Entertaining but...
Nicely told, terrific writing, interesting stories, but each woman's saga(trials/tribulations/relationships) seemed somewhat redundant (a woman's struggle between family and art.) Toward the end, I lost the thread (names too similar/backstory flip-flop)and stopped reading to get my bearings. Not a good thing. May have worked better if done in four distinct parts or even books. Perhaps this was the original intention. Still worth reading.
Why, Erica, why?
I first read Jong's famous Fear of Flying while in college, when the heroine was the ancient-seeming age of 27ish. Have since reread every few years through the present, now well through my 30s, and I still find FoF not only a great read but full of new insight.
Why, oh, why then, can't this woman write another novel I can bear to get through? I can't say I've tried them all (maybe Fear of 50, though not a novel, holds the most promise), but How to Save Your Own Life, for example, and now Inventing Memory, drive me to distraction with their lovingly self-indulgent descriptions of the main Jong character that lacks any of the funny self-deprecating description of FoFlying. The soft-core prose without the bite. Narrative sometimes get going but is quickly knocked off its wheels by the occasionally trenchant but mostly excessive Yiddish proverbs that litter every few paragraphs. A cheesy mess.
Maybe my expectations are just too high, as I still call Flying one of my all time favorite books -- not just because it's fun, but because it offered such dead-on descriptions of questions a woman asks herself as she's coming into her own, plagued alternately by belief in her own brilliance and star power and the fear of failing, as well as wrestling with the idea of where love/men should figure into one's life.
Gone and by the wind-grieved Erica, come back again.
A disappointment
It has been many years since Fear of Flying came out and my reading of it at the time, a funny, irreverent, and poignant feminist manifesto that was very apropos reading for the young woman that I was. Twenty-five plus years later in Inventing Memory, Erica Jong appears to be evaluating what it all means through searching for roots in four generations of a fictional family with an immigrant great grandmother matriarch. That is all well and good, but the style rarely shifts from the mood of what I recall from Fear of Flying.
