Robert Weibezahl

The Comma Queen confesses her passion for everything Greek—language, history, landscape and culture—which was born out of her love for words.

Mary Norris, whose memoir of her years as a copy editor at The New Yorker (Between You & Me) was a surprise bestseller, reveals her nearly 40-year devotion to all things Hellenic in her captivating Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen.

Inspired by an unlikely moment—seeing Sean Connery’s cameo as Agamemnon in the movie Time Bandits—and spurred on by her boss and mentor in The New Yorker’s copy department, Norris took advantage of the magazine’s generous tuition reimbursement policy for “work-related courses” and enrolled in modern Greek at New York University. A new (well, in fact, ancient) world was unleashed for her. Before long, she was studying ancient Greek and deciphering classical texts. She found herself performing original-language versions of Elektra and The Trojan Women as a “mature” student with the Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group (and soliciting character advice from Katharine Hepburn). She immersed herself in the arcane language as best she could, fascinated by its foundational alphabet and the ways Greek survives in so much of modern English.

Most significantly, she went to Greece when she could, exploring the mainland’s many corners and its islands’ many charms. Daring to travel alone to even the most far-flung locales often proved to be an eyebrow-raising heresy in the patriarchal, tradition-centric country, but Norris persisted. Her adventures took her to places few tourists go, to nationally divided Cyprus (birthplace of Aphrodite) and to remote Kardamyli, where the English travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor—whom she calls her literary father—lived and wrote.

While Norris has a keen eye, zeroing in on the peculiarities and beauties of her beloved Greece, her always witty and self-aware narrative tends less toward the descriptive than to the country’s indelible psychic charms. At every turn, the past inextricably intertwines with the present as Norris seeks the origins of ancient Greek culture, rooted in both perceptible landscape and intangible myths. Nostalgia, from the Greek neomai, to return home, “may mean a yearning for a place,” Norris ponders, “but it is also a yearning for a time when you were in that place and therefore for the you of the past.” 

Norris’ inviting book thrives on the writer’s unabashed enthusiasm to learn, to immerse herself in the new and to find clues to her own past in the newly discovered. “I knew a lot of Greek, but I wouldn’t say I spoke Greek or call myself a classicist,” she admits. “I was more in love with the language than it was with me. . . . I had not mastered the language, ancient or modern, but I got glimpses of its genius, its patterns, the way it husbanded the alphabet, stretching those twenty-four letters to record everything anyone could ever want to say.”

Aleksandar Hemon, the Sarajevo-born writer and MacArthur grant recipient, offers a singular approach to memoir in two new books, published together in one volume in a quirky back-to-back, flip-to-read format that literally adheres the two narratives while intentionally keeping them separate. This unusual layout underscores the innate duality but inevitable divide in the story being told—well, stories. One half recounts the lives of Hemon’s father and mother both in their homeland and as immigrants in Canada, while the other is an impressionistic series of vignettes from the author’s childhood in what is now Bosnia. Collectively, My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You is about memory and loss, survival and resilience and an entwined sense of self and place.

Hemon’s parents were born in the years just before World War II reshaped the map of Eastern Europe and, with it, their futures. His mother’s family is ethnically Serb; his father’s family consists of Ukrainians who migrated to present-day Bosnia before the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the unification of Yugoslavia as a socialist state under Tito, the Hemons would have benefited greatly from the nation’s rapid, if long-delayed, move into the 20th century. But then the collapse of the Balkan state and its incendiary violence destroyed the Hemons’ civilized life. In their mid-50s, Hemon’s parents sought refuge in Canada and became the proverbial strangers in a strange land. Their story is one of unspoken trauma, masked beneath existential pragmatism. In their son’s assured narrative hands, it is also one filled with charm and wit.

Hemon’s own reminiscence of prewar Sarajevo, which makes up This Does Not Belong to You, is laced with many normal childhood incidents—stealing coins from his mother’s pocketbook, allowing a bully to destroy a cherished toy car—yet is marked by the knowledge that the world it evokes no longer exists. “Why revisit memories?” he asks early in the book, and this question becomes the watchword for both of these memoirs. The answers lie in the final sentences of This Does Not Belong to You, when Hemon’s mother asks her 6-year-old son for the details of a small ordeal he has weathered. “Tell me, Mama said, how you survived the flood. I want to hear it. Tell us.” So, the writer recalls, “I started telling them.” This is a writer’s testament to the act of storytelling, the art of writing and the impulse, to paraphrase Joan Didion, to tell stories in order to live, to make sense, to survive.

Hemon has taken the raw material of his family’s lives and preserved it in an unexpected way, excavating with it the sources of his own personal history.

Reaching far beyond the boundaries of memoir, Sarah M. Broom revisits the world of her childhood, decimated by Katrina, as she searches for the meaning of home and family.

Sarah M. Broom’s evocative, addictive memoir, The Yellow House, is more than the story of a girl growing up, or of her sprawling African American family, or even of the eponymous shotgun house where they all lived. It’s more than the story of her native New Orleans in the years before and after Katrina. This capacious work captures more than the particulars of a place or a state of mind. It infiltrates the very state of the soul, revealing a way of life tourists never see or, as the destruction of the hurricane and the post-storm neglect would underscore, pay any mind.

The youngest of 12 children born over a span of 30 years in a blended family, Broom begins this story with her clan’s circuitous journey to New Orleans East, a once sparsely populated outland that grew in population and promise when, at the height of the Space Race, NASA began building rocket boosters there and other industries followed. Broom’s father, Simon, who worked maintenance at NASA, died when she was 6 months old, and her mother, Ivory, was left to fend for herself and the children still living in their yellow shotgun house that Ivory had bought for $3,200 in cash when she was 19.

By the time Broom was born, NASA and much of the industry had all but abandoned the blighted area. Despite chronic financial struggles, Ivory proudly strove to keep up appearances. Indeed, one of the most fascinating features of the narrative is Broom’s subtle exploration of class distinctions within the African American communities of New Orleans.

When Katrina hit in 2005, Broom was grown and gone—working at a magazine and living in Harlem—but she has assembled the often-harrowing testimony of her family members who survived the cataclysm. Sacrificed by the powers that be, the largely black neighborhoods in New Orleans East suffered devastation. In the aftermath of Katrina, when the ruins of the Yellow House are deemed in “imminent danger of collapse” and slated for demolition, Broom realizes that the house “contained all of my frustration and many of my aspirations, the hopes that it would shine like it did in the world before me.” The house, she comes to see, held more than the memory of her father or the past. It sustained the very concept of home. And she understands that without the physical structure, she and her family are now the house.

The Yellow House is a lyrical attempt to reconstruct home, to redraw a map that nature and a heartless world have erased. The melodies of Broom’s prose are insinuating, its rhythms as syncopated and edgy as the story she has dared to write. With a voice all her own, she tells truths rarely told and impossible to ignore.