IF TREES COULD TALK

Sculptor and writer McMahon tells her own story and offers a fictionalized history of previous generations.

The author, who was born in Chicago, tells of growing up with eight siblings. Her artist/reporter father, William Franklin McMahon, covered important events for Lifemagazine—most famously, the 1955 trial of the alleged murderers of Emmet Till; her mother, Irene, was a travel writer. The family briefly moved to Spain in 1957, when the author was a baby, but settled the next year in Lake Forest, Illinois. The large house had an art studio for each of the children, and McMahon started sculpting at age 14. She later attended Hamline University in Minnesota, where she made bronze pieces, took up mountain climbing, traveled to Ireland, and published research on global warming for World Book. The author pursued a master’s degree in sculpture at Yale University while teaching and creating commissioned pieces. After marrying and starting a family of her own, she investigated her parents’ pasts, particularly during World War II. She also looked further back in her family history, she says, even as members of her family were fighting over her father’s estate. Later, the author went in search of white granite to use for her family burial site, visiting an area that figured in the lives of her ancestors: “It took decades to find Alderbrook….Now I could inhale the pine scented air and sift the needles for stories.” In this book, McMahon recounts detailed stories of her maturation as an artist and effectively demonstrates, by recounting fictionalized stories of her family members, that one can make the past ever present. Unlike many memoirs, she intriguingly organizes hers by going backward chronologically, at least in part; as she grows older, her personal interest is drawn continually further back in time. However, readers may find that the lengthy, fictional narratives about ancestors—such as a tale of her great-great-grandfather from the 1800s, weaved into a story of her own father at a rehabilitation center after a stroke—tend to break the flow of the text.

A sometimes-engaging but unevenly executed memoir and exploration of the past.