Memory’s Wake
Memory’s Wake is a brilliant, haunting masterpiece. Owens uncovers a tale of devastating brutality and intimate struggle with prose so inspired, so precisely, languidly beautiful it leaves you breathless. This story of one mother’s unfathomable hatred and one mother’s transcendent love is more than a personal history. Through revealing his mother’s trials and trauma Owens delivers us into the arms of our best and strangest self. The self capable of more than survival, capable of grace. Not since David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives has an American writer excavated the landscape of familial, spiritual and historical wreckage with such intelligence and honesty. Memory’s Wake is a profound and deeply moving memoir, apocalyptic in the truest sense of the word. Cara Hoffman (author of So Much Pretty) Derek Owens’ Memory’s Wake is a solitary son’s journey into the forgotten burrows of New York State’s “Burnt Over District.” He uncovers an ancient American Furnace ready still, even in its twilights, to spread the upheavals of trance, hallucination, and the showers of whispers that seem to rain down out of this so often overlooked geography. He lets himself be bitten deeply by the ghost-footed noises he uncovers and the unsheltered wonders of our claimed and unclaimed ancestral broods who ignited the firestorms of prophesies, dooms, raptures, and locks of talking hair spilling their secrets into the beginning of our twenty-first century lives. David Matlin (author of It Might Do Well With Strawberries)
excerpt from the book
My mother’s memories came sharp and undistorted–none of the color flaring and scratches of home movies. Episodes broke through with icy clarity, core samples pulled from the bowels of the brain, molecules tasting air after eons. The branches of the neural forest lighting up like Christmas trees. Unsolicited intruders barging into that most intimate of theaters….Maybe the mind is a Victorian house of enormous proportions, featuring hundreds, thousands, of doors: front doors, back doors, cellar doors, attic doors. Flapping cat doors cut into side doors. Cuckoo clock doors, oven doors, refrigerator doors. Bedroom doors behind which are closet doors behind which are dollhouses with tiny trap doors. Dumbwaiter doors, laundry chute doors, furnace doors. Storm doors and sub-basement doors. All sealed with cobwebs and dust. My mother wandering through the house wearing a ring of skeleton keys carved from yellow bone. One by one they fly off the ring and sail throughout the house, zipping around corners like heat seeking missiles, driving into keyholes mouthing “open me, open me.” In Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s famous labyrinthine “Mystery House” in San Jose, California, the good ghosts told her where to build faux doors so as to confuse the bad. Maybe my mother’s interior architects, after all those years, simply ran out of doors….