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Listen : A Memoir
by Wendy Salinger
Published: 2006-04-04
Hardcover : 192 pages
Hardcover : 192 pages
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Poetic and haunting, Listen is an artfully rendered memoir that recounts the author’s relationship with her brilliant and abusive father.
Listen is a memoir of voices, the voices of parents that linger in the ears of children until the day when those children are able to sound their own ...
Listen is a memoir of voices, the voices of parents that linger in the ears of children until the day when those children are able to sound their own ...
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Introduction
Poetic and haunting, Listen is an artfully rendered memoir that recounts the author’s relationship with her brilliant and abusive father.
Listen is a memoir of voices, the voices of parents that linger in the ears of children until the day when those children are able to sound their own note. A domineering father and a professor of languages and literature in the 1950s and ‘60s, Victor has four women trapped in his orbit—his long-suffering wife and his three well-behaved daughters. “Teacher, poet, translator” is how he wants his gravestone to read, and in life he is dedicated to passing on to his family the great cultural achievements of western civilization—poetry, philosophy, religion, music, art. But he leaves darker gifts as well, in particular to his daughter Wendy the most traumatic legacy of all: incest.
A major achievement and a stunning debut, Listen is about how families shape their memories and how even things that are never spoken about have potent echoes. It’s also a memoir that chronicles a poet’s apprenticeship to words, the story of a daughter who listened and who, with the gift for poetry her father gave her, learned to translate the darkest secrets of their past.
Listen is a memoir of voices, the voices of parents that linger in the ears of children until the day when those children are able to sound their own note. A domineering father and a professor of languages and literature in the 1950s and ‘60s, Victor has four women trapped in his orbit—his long-suffering wife and his three well-behaved daughters. “Teacher, poet, translator” is how he wants his gravestone to read, and in life he is dedicated to passing on to his family the great cultural achievements of western civilization—poetry, philosophy, religion, music, art. But he leaves darker gifts as well, in particular to his daughter Wendy the most traumatic legacy of all: incest.
A major achievement and a stunning debut, Listen is about how families shape their memories and how even things that are never spoken about have potent echoes. It’s also a memoir that chronicles a poet’s apprenticeship to words, the story of a daughter who listened and who, with the gift for poetry her father gave her, learned to translate the darkest secrets of their past.
Excerpt
Excerpt #1: He drove us. No one else could. He's little behind the rim of the wheel, only five-foot-six. It's the head that dominates, the fixity of his gaze. The muscle popping in his jaw, the monoxide of the lecture. His neck hunkers down inside his raincoat, the gray needles of his hair where it's grown too long pricking the collar. He's had to cancel the barber again, had to sacrifice his own needs to ours--again. ...
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Discussion Questions
1) Do you think the emotional dynamics of this family are specific to families of a certain era--the 1950's through the 1970's--or do they still ring true today?2) What are the different approaches to family memories that the people in this household appear to have?
3) Is it important to you whether the words attributed to the people in this memoir were spoken exactly as written? Why or why not?
4) Do you feel any sympathy for the father during the course of the narrative?
5) What is the difference between the sound of the mother's voice and the sound of the father's?
6) What is the effect of the events of her childhood on the narrator's [Salinger's] adulthood?
7) Do the events of family life have the same effect on the narrator's two sisters as they do on her?
8) How important did the political events of this era seem in the life of the family?
9) Does it make any difference to this story that the narrator grows up to be a writer?
10) Why is the memoir called "Listen"?
11) Would the events of the narrator's childhood have been as devastating without the element of incest? Why or why not?
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