Staff Picks: Men-Children, Motown, and Middle Age
Jennifer Croft.
Of late, I’ve encountered a cluster of victorious, independent teens in my reading. In Tara Westover’s , Tara splits from her Idaho family’s abuse to thrive in the British education system. In Lara Prior-Palmer’s , Lara decamps from a posh English upbringing to ride a pony across the Mongolian-Manchurian steppe. A similar narrative even springs up in the latest Sally Rooney novel, : Marianne quits her hometown to find some version of herself and success at Trinity. These stories detail train wrecks and triumph, following young women going it alone to overcome anything, everything. Jennifer Croft’s new memoir, , takes that same fabric of the young woman finding her way and makes an entirely different garment. Here is a young woman refusing to let go of her family: little sister Zoe gets sick, and Amy (Jennifer’s stand-in) Croft teaches us to read another way: the story is told between long, potent subtitles and short vignettes, between the focus of Croft’s photos and what might be out of the frame. It’s a slower sort of storytelling, a family wound up together, heading not toward victory but acceptance. And in creating that intricate web, one built of ambitious form, unflinching recollection, and her own style of multifaceted lyricism, Croft has arrived at a triumph of another kind.
