In “Be Sure to Read This First, a Preface,” Frank de Caro begins, “This book is partly a memoir, but a memoir with a difference . . .” (ix). The import of Frank de Caro’s “memoir with a difference” is nested in his emphasis on “the stories we tell and listen to” and how they shape “our temporal selves” (ix). Any folklorist interested in personal narratives, oral narratives, oral history, memoirs and/or the shaping of identity simply must read this book. De Caro explains, “In this book I talk about the stories that are part of my personal memory and the memories of other people I have known and consider what they are telling me about my personal worldview and the worldview of those around me” (x). Thus the embrace of the concept of his own life story is encapsulated in the sub-title, “Memory, History, Narrative.”
De Caro links his approach to the influence of Jerome Mintz (1930-1997), who introduced him to the life history method when de Caro was a graduate student in the Folklore Institute at Indiana University (xi). He also acknowledges the influence of his folklore friends and colleagues, William A. Wilson and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, and links his work to the influence of others who have written about personal narratives and family stories (xv, n.1). De Caro credits folklorists for turning attention to “the most humble stories,” to the narratives of the “socially marginalized”; and more recently “to the most everyday stories, the personal narratives that people tell about themselves” (4). Thus, de Caro is carrying us further in the study of narrative into the personal, into the reflexive, and, really, into meta-narrative because he supplies pithy and penetrating analyses of the process and importance of narrative and memoir in giving us a sense of place and of self.
Frank de Caro’s Stories of Our Lives will encourage readers to think personally, to reflect on their own narratives and to link these to the broader realm of narratives. I relished the specifics of Frank’s story, but also recognized the thematic elements shared by so many of us whose ancestors blended into the American immigrant stream in the nineteenth century; went west, or went Midwest; and “met” the Indians. Frank takes the reader on the stepping-stones of his memory, to the narratives that knit together his view of the world. He leads us to the stories from his mother’s side of the family, which he recounts as “a continuous narrative” (7), though he acknowledges that these stories were told “as a fragmented, sketchy saga,” in “no particular order” (7). He takes us to his own sense of place, “7002 Ridge”: “Of course, I was born in a place and grew up in a place and I have always felt strongly influenced by place” (16). Then the “Foreigners Arrive,” and Frank recounts stories of his “personal beginnings linking me and ‘my people’ to the national story” (26). His relatives change names, from Francesco to Frank (37), or the pronunciation of names, from Mulveal (37) to Mul-ve-hill (36); and in the process, shift names to match place. The reader follows de Caro in the other venues that weave into his stories. As he writes, “Stories have this power to reach back and suddenly illuminate both past and present, to seemingly pull together our sense of ourselves and our history, our grasp of place” (16).
De Caro teases out the categories of narrative and provides explanation for their import:
story = told as a tale by oneself or by others (x);
life memory = part of the life history method, and the focus on the “importance of the individual tradition bearer” (xi);
family saga = stories comprising family history (xi);
family stories = stories with both “collective and personal meaning” that place us in the “bigger pictures” (26) and tell of our origins (xii);
constituent memories = stories of others that link to us (xii), which are also referred to as “anecdotal memories” (xii).
De Caro also refers to “fragments of stories” (24) that formed part of the larger narratives. I refer to these as the snippets of family memory, and I join with de Caro in seeing what he calls fragments and I call snippets as important. I think, however, that there is an unacknowledged tension here between the snippets of family memory—indeed told just as snippets, in “no particular order” (7), without a chronology or a linking story line—and the constructed thread of the memoir. It is Frank’s privilege to connect the punctuated stories, to weave his memoir into a cohesive piece, but I think there is a distinction between life memory and memoir that is important to keep in the foreground. From de Caro’s perspective, “The smaller narrative components inform the larger narrative”; and he draws the smaller components into his “conception of the bigger whole” to convey meaning (211). From my perspective, the smaller narratives are the story; the composite narrative becomes an artificial construct, not unimportant but nonetheless put together as a sense-making effort, since we are sense-making and story-telling animals.
Frank de Caro’s Stories of Our Lives spreads before us the “transcendent” nature of narratives that build from the mundane (x), and “the revelatory power of oral narratives” (4). Narratives are the keys to our memory, “We remember some things because we have formulated and told stories about them; this helps us to remember the events and people and conditions the stories are about” (xii). Stories, as de Caro discusses them, “distill” the essence of our lives, and convey “the fundamental visions of our lives and surroundings and personal pasts” (xii). Frank de Caro has spread all this before us, this endearingly personal story of his life and this enduringly important reflection on stories, which ultimately comments in meta-narrative fashion on the telling of the lives of others.
--------
[Review length: 976 words • Review posted on March 26, 2014]