In Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments, Rowan McCandless uses a lovely, unique manner to create her memoir; she uses scaffolding of various types, including the alphabet that begins the book (“A is for ancestry…and also for ambiguity, anemia, and ancestry.ca.”). This alphabet that begins this work gives a baseline from which she and her readers explore her life: identity, religion, colonialism. It is followed by a screenplay, poems, and crossword puzzles, and essays. There is also a marriage contract between “the party of the first part and the party of the second part” rather than the usual bland platitudes represented in the “love, honor, and obey” marriage vows, showing her version of the terms of her marriage. In this creative yet unorthodox manner, Ms. McCandless lays out the hardships she endures in her lifetime, ranging from poverty, childhood and domestic abuse, an eating disorder, depression, anxiety, and racism so institutionalized it affects the youngest of children—how can a child of color understand the use of the flesh-colored crayons?
The author draws upon the Greek goddess, Persephone, to represent the duality of McCandless’s life. After eating three pomegranate seeds in the Underworld, Persephone must spend part of her year there and part on the surface of the earth, thus effectively straddling two worlds. Ms. McCandless, a biracial woman, must do the same, existing between her white and her black families. Though the timeframe isn’t chronological, the bouncing around gives some sense of how memories are explored, the framed and reframed over time. Overall, this was a powerful, moving book that will haunt you.
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Persephone’s Children: A Life in Fragments is available through:
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