Author examines family in memoir

Kelli Sutterman / Admin

May. 5, 2013 2:38 pm

In “Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness,” Hemley is a detective seeking clues in texts. The mystery he is trying to solve is his family.

Hemley is the director of the non-fiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. A new edition of “Nola,” first published in the late 1990s, has been published by the University of Iowa Press.

While Nola, Hemley's half-sister who died in 1973, is at the heart of the book, Hemley's project is a wider inquiry into his family. His mother and father, his grandparents, his brother, Nola's father, and, of course, Hemley himself are part of the history he is relating and creating.

The book is filled with texts of various sorts - a transcription of Hemley's childhood session with a hypnotist; court documents concerning his mother's marriage (or lack thereof) to Nola's father; an appreciation of his father's writing that appeared after his death; a short story by Hemley's mother and another by Hemley himself. And looming over all the other texts in play is Nola's autobiography, printed with Hemley's mother's edits visible on the page.

All of these documents, Hemley persuasively argues, contain elements of fiction and non-fiction to one degree or another. “But I let my sister tell you the story and I tell you the story in different fashions,” Hemley writes early on, “and somewhere there, in that space between contradictions, lies a kind of truth that perhaps you can enter into and wonder about. It's not belief that I'm after, but wonder, the opening up of possibility.”

The unconventional form of the memoir invites the reader to consider the ways in which shared events might be differently remembered and have different meanings or weight for the participants. The truth Hemley is sussing out is shared, provisional and subject to revision. Hemley's quest is fascinating reading for precisely these reasons.

Related: Life with Nola