The Crooked Little Road

The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After Happiness is a memoir by Heather Harpham.

       When someone sits down to write the story she "has to write," so many questions bubble to surface that it smells like writer's stew: Where to begin?  How to shape it to arouse interest in strangers who pick up the book?  What to name this baby?

       This memoir begins with the birth of a baby--the author's own, a little girl, with imperceptible (to her mother) health issues that can threaten the baby's brain or lead to death. A memoir, like a novel, does well to begin with such a big question.

       Then like pages folded back and forth like a fan, before the question is neatly answered or the conflict resolved, the writer goes back to her first date with the baby's father, a man she loves, a well-known writer, a man who has made it plain from the start that he doesn't want to be a father.

       Then that page is folded back and we return to the NICU in San Francisco where the baby is being treated and the mother is cared for by her mother and friends, a tribe of women and a dog named Lulu.

       Back and forth it goes, creating a beautiful fan of a narrative, colored with paragraphs that take the reader into the writer's experience:

       As I walked home, the hills soaked up the dusk, turning blue-black.  Then, slowly, they lit up, house by house, like a night sky.  Each pinprick of light was a family.  Was I technically now a family, too? I housed a cluster of cells, dividing at breakneck pace.  I was, at the very least, a party of two." 

About the baby:

       What I had to give her included my useless, cyclical worry.  True.  But also joy.  Happiness--slippery, mobile, sneaky and spry--enters the most unlikely rooms, unbidden.  It can sneak up on you nearly anywhere and likewise wisp away.  She was alive; she was wearing her soft cotton clothes, her rosebud hat, breathing in the car in the dark as a light rain touched everything with what e.e. cummings once described as "such small hands." 

And:

     When I had imagined threats to my future children, they'd been external.  Strangers hovering at the edge of playgrounds in loose, gray sweatshirts; rotting rope swings fraying over jagged rocks; cars, everywhere, callous, steely-eyed killer-cars.  These were possibilities I could conceive of.  Illness had never slunk across the screen of my anxieties with its curved spin and sallow cheeks.... 

       Most stories, cooked down to the essentials, can be told in a few minutes or a few pages.  Many can be told chronologically, moving from birth to old age, all resolutions neatly tied up in the end.  But to create a narrative that recreates the inner and outer experience, and doesn't allow you to drift off while reading--this is a monumental challenge for any writer.

       Heather Harpham gets it just right.