Color Is the Suffering of Light: A Memoir

by Melissa Green

An acclaimed poet's memoir is a portrait of a young girl searching for meaning and beauty in a world of suffocating mother love, spiritual and physical poverty, alcoholism, and despair--with nature and the English language as her only allies.

Genres: Memoir, Biography

341 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Holly]

Reading this book is like being Facebook friends with a verbally adroit but emotionally clueless mentally ill person who lacks the distance and self-reflection to understand why no one likes or comments on her posts meticulously detailing everything she ate for breakfast.

The prologue starts like this:

We didn't think you would live until your fortieth year. How did you?
You wouldn't believe me, even if I could tell you, I replied. Writing this book, in part, has helped to heal me.

So there you go: we learn before we read anything else that the author's story is so awful she shouldn't have reached the age of 40, that she is unable to tell her story in a way that we would believe it, and that writing the book made everything better.

There is an element of mental illness that is not adequately dealt with in this book, and while it makes you feel sorry for the narrator, it doesn't make for rewarding reading. I experienced adolescent depression myself and know it's no picnic, but good god, this girl's response to EVERYTHING is despair. She cries inconsolably the last day of sixth grade and refuses to get in the car because it's her last day of sixth grade and somehow that's just unendurable. Her reaction to learning about menstruation is to cry inconsolably. Her reaction to pretty much everything is to cry inconsolably.

Which is perfectly fine material for a memoir. But all she ever does is DESCRIBE the events that make her cry inconsolably and then describe the inconsolable crying. There's no reflection, no awareness that part of the problem really was her, her emotional and mental illness. So what that she wanted to read and write? That alone doesn't redeem all these anecdotes of petty family cruelties. She doesn't seem to have any real insight into her situation--or, for that matter, into any element of writing but description. Despite being almost 350 pages long, the book doesn't really have a narrative. It's just a collection of vignettes about her childhood, all related with the same tone, with no increase of dramatic pitch and no building tension and no climax and nothing but endless details like this:

[Granny] always talked about her bowels. I'd look at her, trying to understand, then manage to choke down five wrinkled, hot prunes. Afterward, as a kind of reward, she would give me a glass bowl of peaches, cut up and dusted with powdered sugar, and a little ivory two-pronged fork to eat them with. Then I would have tea, very light and sweet, in my own china cup.

It's not just that she has to tell us exactly what kind of fork she ate peaches with. It's that we're somehow supposed to understand why eating peaches with a little fork is somehow devastatingly terrible, a trauma from which it will takes years to recover.

The narrator's grandmother has saved everything from her life and wants to give it all to young Melissa, commanding her to treasure every last broken teacup and worn-out dress, because they mattered to Granny and will, she believes, be worth genuine money someday. Granny lacks the discernment to judge what's really valuable and worth saving, and what should be jettisoned because it's flat-out crap.

It's the same problem the author has with her memories and material. She tries provide the reader with every single detail she has saved from her life, because well, it was a detail that she saved and it must not be lost! Doesn't matter that it's really just junk now, just a maddening jumble cluttering up something that could otherwise be beautiful or useful.

The book proper ends with her still in early adolescence, and then we get an epilogue of what she's like at 40, with not a word about what happened in between. But somehow, it's supposed to be all redemptive, and we're supposed to believe it's so miraculous that she survived and went on to write this boring, cluttered, myopic, self-indulgent book.

[Sa Riz]

Wonderful, precise and lovely words; deep, deep, deep perception of the minutiae of growing up in a farm; but not a whole lot of motion, action. After a white it bogged down. The best way to enjoy Green's stupendous depth of perception is by reading a random long sentence from a random page. Her searing isolation and terrifying emotional tenderness shines through in her gem like sentence-level clarity.

[Morrigan]

There were great parts of this book where the writing made a clear picture in your head and then it got so metaphorical that it was difficult to follow. It really reminded me of a long long LONG poem and I often lost interest.

[Bunnyhoopla]

i mostly like the title. it's a favorite of a good friend.

[Shannon]

I don't know.. I saw this at the used bookstore today, i like the title but it's a memoir so hmm. It may be self-piteous.

[Lisa]

I couldn't get past the first few chapters. I might come back to this book some day, but it just didn't grab me.

[Maureen Stanton]

Beautiful writing, exquisite language; I found this memoir compelling. There's a dull patch in the middle (dryly offered family history), but otherwise this is one of my favorite memoirs.