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them. Editors despair of trying to bring a great memoir to the attention of readers. Thanks to the book club, word of mouth, perhaps even Book Crossing, whose membersleave books in public places for strangers to pick up, there’s a wisp of hope. How else would good memoirs get a chance?
    The best Second World War memoir (and like many people, I went through an intense Second World War phase) was
And No Birds Sang
, written by Farley Mowat, a Canadian writer of great reach. He could write comic novels, adventure novels for kids and scientific works, but at some point he sat down and wrote the tale of his joining the Hasty Pees, his father’s army regiment, and fighting through Italy, including at the horrific battle for the citadel village of Assoro. The terror of Assoro was that it was a fortress on a mountain, perched on the edge of a massive cliff. The task was to climb the cliff in the dark, undetected by German sentries, and take the town.
    Mowat is good at detail. His description of a German sniper slowly firing bullet after bullet at a donkey as it wiggled in agony until a disgusted Canadian soldier finished the animal off has stayed with me to this day. We are told that the Americans admire Canadian snipers in the latest war in Afghanistan. I think snipers are cowards. I despise them. How clever you are to shoot someone in the back.
    Mowat describes a soldier falling forward at the waist, his body perfectly sliced in two by a series of bullets. Journalism doesn’t tell you this; readers might disapprove of war if they knew such things happened.
    Not until I read Robert Fisk’s dispatches about Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians in
The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East
did Iread war described in this way again. Fisk says that telling readers what is done to human bodies, especially those of civilians, is the key to reporting. We have no idea what war is. He tells us of a squishy feeling under his boots and the realization that he was standing on a pile of murdered civilians in a refugee camp, the pile gathered by Israeli bulldozers. He describes a halo of wooden clothes pegs around the head of a woman shot to death as she was hanging up her laundry. He describes the vomiting of reporters as they came upon the slaughter that was abetted by Ariel Sharon, a war criminal later elected leader of Israel (and now he’s a vegetable, tra-la).
    Thanks to those small details, I see the Sharonistas differently than many people do. Clothes pegs. Sharon’s bulging face, the face of an assistant killer.
    Henry James said writing was all about seeing the pattern in the carpet. It occurs to me that many modern readers won’t get this. For one thing, everyone but me has fashionable planked wood flooring. Even if they have carpet, as I do, there’s no pattern. My carpet is a flat expanse of grey. James was a Victorian, which means he lived in an era of such fantastically complicated patterned carpeting that staring at it would make you go mad like that woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892
The Yellow Wallpaper
. I love you, Henry, but the complexity of your novels goes beyond even the maddest of Victorian flooring.
    Nevertheless, a Pain Memoir has to have some kind of pattern or theme. The Rotten Parents theme is probably the most fruitful, given that most parents are spectacularly inept—family values, indeed—even when they meanwell. Subsets are Handed Over to Rotten Relatives
(City of One
by Francine Cournos, a great book by the way), Donated to Pedophile Cult (see Burroughs, above) and Evil Stepmother.
    My favourite of this last subset is Helga Schneider’s
Let Me Go
, if only because the author is a lovely person who to this day doesn’t grasp that no court would convict her for having split her mother’s head open with axe. Hers was a careerist mother. Helga’s mother abandoned the family to join the SS and become a concentration camp guard who really loved her work and found