With biography and memoir, it seems that readers are buying a certain kind of truth –call it authenticity, the authority of fact. Yet all reading is escapism, even when we are escaping to what we consider true; even in non-fiction, we seek some of fiction’s satisfactions. This is the challenge: to find a theme and structure that will shape the story without sacrificing a sense of intransigent reality.
Clara’s Witch by Natalie Andrews
FACP, $24.95pb, 269pp
Midnight Water: A Memoir by Gaylene Perry
Picador, $19.95pb, 183pp
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