THE ART OF BECOMING A CITIZEN

A prolific writer puts her formative years in conversation with the current political climate.

Just before marrying her first husband, Godwin and a crowd of colleagues covered the choreographed, post-election meeting between President-elect John F. Kennedy and his defeated opponent, Richard Nixon. By the time Kennedy was shot in 1963, the author had left her marriage and moved to London to work for the U.S. Embassy’s Travel Service. In this memoir, she reminisces about those years living abroad—her work, friendships, another engagement, and a second marriage—and fuses them with the mortification and angst she felt leading up to the 2024 presidential election. Trained in Godwin’s crosshairs are not the particulars of policies, but rather the loss of decorum and the weight of the law—so alien from the handshakes and performed civility that she had witnessed after Kennedy won an election fraught with its own fraud theories. The author’s chapters on her recent years show her engaged in her lifelong practice of building a story—committing to it and finding its intention and urgency. Relatively unadorned, they generate a blunt portrait that prompts almost existential hand-wringing. Yet, these sections feel unmoored from their counterpoint in Godwin’s escape to and return from London in the 1960s, obscuring the “understory to [her] history” that she teases in the preface. The synthesis that she discerns is thinned by details of workers and caretakers visiting her home in Woodstock, New York; cataloguings of outrageous news headlines of Donald Trump’s criminal prosecution and indictment; and extensive quotes from blogs, debate transcripts, and Washington Post comment sections. Instead, the reader finds anchor in the arc of Godwin’s inching herself back from London, toward the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the mentorship of Kurt Vonnegut, and what turned out to be an illustrative career.

A slightly scattered but still noteworthy and perceptive retrospective.