When memoir is done well it has the capacity to invoke a far deeper connection than fiction. In memoir, you understand these characters are alive or at least once lived. It becomes not just a story, but a relation of memory, a communing of remarkable vulnerability. Liz Scott, in her memoir This Never Happened, does memoir remarkably well.
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“Book Review: This Never Happened” — reviewed by Jaylynn Korrell
A tug of war between compassion and resentment.
The trauma our parents cause us isn’t always easily resolved in a therapy session. This Never Happened, a memoir by Liz Scott, exemplifies just how long those wounds can stay unhealed.
A woman now “in [her] eighth decade,” Scott writes this book as a glance back on the foundation that started her journey. With emphasis on figuring out her past, she tries to come to terms with the anonymity that both her parents left of their history. They provided her no glimpse into their own lives and no information about the families they both come from. Left to her own devices, Scott takes it upon herself to piece together their lives and all the things that happened between the silence within her family.
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