Lain's review
Floor Sample by Julia Cameron
The difficulty in critiquing memoirs is that it's near impossible for me to critique the writing without critiquing the life. In this case, there is much to raise one's eyebrows at in Julia Cameron's long, fruitful, and erratic life (she seems to be ruled by the winds as much as by the muse).
But her writing is clear, her life has been an interesting one, and she seems to hold little back when writing about her challenges and struggles with mental illness and alcoholism. A fragile, yet indominatable personality, Cameron bounces from one side of the continent to the other, generating reams of prose, poetry, songs, and other artistic works on the way.
My biggest beef with her life is the way that she seems to see others as bit players in her drama ("Everywhere I turned, people seemed to have their own agendas," she moans in one chapter, wondering why her friends and acquaintances are unwilling to drop their own lives to help caretake in hers).
My biggest beef with h...more
But her writing is clear, her life has been an interesting one, and she seems to hold little back when writing about her challenges and struggles with mental illness and alcoholism. A fragile, yet indominatable personality, Cameron bounces from one side of the continent to the other, generating reams of prose, poetry, songs, and other artistic works on the way.
My biggest beef with her life is the way that she seems to see others as bit players in her drama ("Everywhere I turned, people seemed to have their own agendas," she moans in one chapter, wondering why her friends and acquaintances are unwilling to drop their own lives to help caretake in hers).
My biggest beef with h...more
