Sarah E. Moffett

It’s a standard issue Friday morning in D.C. Showered, suited, and serious, I’m drowning my left brained woes in my mocha frap, catching up on my overflowing inboxes, when I see that that Jason Pettus of the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography has posted his review for Growing Up Moffett.

To my knowledge, this is the first time that someone has openly reviewed the book from the perspective of an atheist. It’s fascinating to see what resonates and what falls flat. The full review is here, but for those of you that would like to get a taste of Growing Up Moffett’s beating-meets-pat-on-the-head, read on. But drink something stronger than a frap first.  I should have.

Chicago Center for Literature and Photography Review

As anyone who has tried it before can attest, the writing of a creative personal memoir can be a much trickier thing than it might seem at first; that even though it’s true that most of us have at least one fascinating story from our real pasts, there’s a wide gulf between that and a finished book the general public will find entertaining. There is the uniqueness of the story to consider; there is what the person learned about life from the experience, and what insights they have to share with others. There is the issue of real people turned into literary characters, a process that does not necessarily produce great results every time; and then there’s the writing skills of the memoirist themselves, and of whether they understand the proper points of their life story in which to start and finish their manuscript. As thousands have remarked on separate occasions now over the centuries, there’s a difference between a captivating real story and a captivating book, with one of these not necessarily equalling the other.

And thus do we arrive at the awkwardly titled but still compelling Growing Up Moffett: The Rise and Fall of Innocence In a Pathos-Plagued Year, by an attorney in the Washington DC area named Sarah Moffett; it is basically a look at a particularly craptastic year from Moffett’s childhood, where in a single twelve-month period she lost three close family members (grandmother, grandfather and uncle) to cancer, which she then uses in the book as a springboard into more general thoughts concerning childhood, loss, family, and her strict Christian faith. (In fact, this is an important thing to understand before picking the book up in the first place — that it is published by a Christian-based small press, and that the book has a specific pro-Christian message.) And indeed, faith-based philosophical opinions about life aside, the heart of the book is a sincerely page-flipping tale of grief, the coping process, and the power of family to get past it all; but unfortunately, like many other such memoirs from beginning writers, Moffett has difficulty determining where to begin and end her story, subjecting us instead to a bevy of unilluminating and superfluous thoughts concerning EveryFamily USA, thoughts that will be of little interest to anyone outside of Moffett’s own family and friends. It’s an intriguing book, a read I’m glad I made, solidly written if nothing outstanding; unfortunately, though, it’s about twice as long as it should be, with a first half that could literally be lopped off without missing a single story element of note. . . 

***Rest of Review***

Out of 10: 7.0

*For what it’s worth, I myself have been an atheist for almost 25 years now, although am also a political supporter of the pacifistic interfaith movement; I tried not to let my own beliefs influence my review of this book, although they undoubtedly did at least a little.

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