Devotion: A Memoir

Miriam Levine

en Limba Engleză Paperback – 30 oct 2012

To Miriam Levine, devotion implies love and self-creation; to her mother s generation, it meant martyrdom and self-denial. The domain of this memoir is the interval between those attitudes. Devotion is the expression of a sensibility that trusts the physical a facet of women s existence that is at once ennobling and primary, transcendent and spiritual. Affirming her deep connection to people, Levine draws from a rich expanse of memories, misgivings, epiphanies, and associations to tell of the adventures and dangers of her emergence as a woman writer."

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To Miriam Levine, "devotion" implies love and self-creation; to her mother's generation, it meant martyrdom and self-denial. The domain of this memoir is the interval between those attitudes. Devotion is the expression of a sensibility that trusts the physical - a facet of women's existence that is at once ennobling and primary, transcendent and spiritual. Affirming her deep connection to people Levine draws from a rich expanse of memories, misgivings, epiphanies, and associations to tell of the adventures and dangers of her emergence as a woman and a writer. Devotion begins with a series of anecdotal family portraits from the author's youth in postwar New Jersey. A stalker of secrets in the adult world, Levine eavesdropped and explored her way to precocity. She savored her work as a "spy", but the rewards were sometimes painful - especially the revelation of her father's shame for his lack of education. Amid details of her working-class, Jewish-American background, Levine recalls such relatives as her Uncle Sam, who lived in exuberant defiance of the congenital syphilis that blinded him. In her grandmother Molly, Levine sensed unrealized artistry. A mother of six, homebound by tradition and necessity, Molly cooked and sewed with passion and brilliant precision. Formal learning sharpened Levine's sense of the world's ironies and multiplicities. Looking back to her days as a literature student at Boston University in the early 1960s, she writes of a gifted, influential professor - and of the compromises he thrust on his intelligent and educated wife. The course of Levine's own life during college ran counter to the romantic myths of womanhood: The promise of erotic pleasure, notemotional fulfillment, drew her to a debauched salesman who guided her, satyrlike, into the city's nightlife. Her involvement with another man led to an illegal abortion that almost killed her. In the final chapters, set in more recent years, Levine's daily concerns mingle with her sense of fulfillment as a writer. She reflects not only on the hard-won pleasures of the literary life - good food, good talk, and travel - but also on the satisfaction she finds in her own garden and kitchen. Levine continues to challenge the conventional myths of women's lives. Thoughts of her family's struggles with addiction invade her impressionistic sketches of Italy. Esteem for the perseverance and deep humanity of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and English writer Jean Rhys, whom Levine meets, gives way to fearful concern about her son's teenage world - a concern hastened by news of a brutal murder involving the boy's circle of friends. Devotion engages critical women's issues through Levine's grasp of her own mind and body's irreducible truths. At the heart of her recollections lie the elements of a vital new tradition in autobiographical writing - restraint from blame and self-absorption, belief in the honor of work, and confidence that the details of a woman's life truly do matter.