MOMENTUM

Brown presents a memoir of searching for her place in the world after a childhood marked by familial detachment.

The author launches her account with a description of her Uncle Bib’s memorial in 2007 in a small temple near Manhattan’s Central Park. Family members praised Bib’s caring and generous ways, and it struck the then-52-year-old author that her own upbringing had lacked such closeness; things especially deteriorated, she recalls, after her parents’ 1960s divorce, when she was 12. Brown also sensed signs of approaching dementia in her dad’s behavior, and she resolved to have a discussion with him to try to resolve the feelings of emptiness she’d had ever since childhood: “I needed positive, loving memories I could hold onto now and save for later,” when she and her siblings would eulogize him. In this book, she effectively delivers a recollection of a comfortable mid-20th-century childhood in Beverly Hills, California, that seemed outwardly conventional but was marked by her frustration at never feeling heard by her parents. The story of her journey to adulthood and independence includes episodes of unwilling relocation with her mother (to Berkeley) and stretches of lax supervision during her mom’s travels. The author began to develop a greater sense of belonging after she enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, and as a result of her involvement with a woman-led leftist collective. Throughout, Brown reveals her hard-earned observations about finding her place through her own efforts, and overall, the work comes across as a therapeutic exercise in introspection and understanding, focused on memories and missed connections. The memoir also has a peripatetic quality as it catalogs various moves she made about the United States and Canada. She delves into her relationship with her husband-to-be,Tony, a Canadian by birth and an international-relations academic, and connects it to her search for a comfortable emotional space to grow her marketing career and maintain a family life. In the end, she comes full circle, ending the narrative much the way it began—with accounts of her parents’ and stepmother’s demises and funeral remembrances.

A deeply personal story of a quest for belonging.