Memory's Helper

Writing Her Own Life by Mary Clearman Blew

Writing is not just a plot, the facts, or even a character study. Well written pieces open the reader's imagination inviting a sort of Spock-like mind meld with another time and place. This book is a conversation between the author and her aunt's journal (kept in the mid 1930's through the 40's). She questions her aunt's choices, marvels at her strength and quietly listens to her wisdom.

This book reminds me Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It." I think the time period is similar and they are both about memories and growing up in the west at that time.
"After all, memory occupies no space. memory lives in its own small realm of bone and brain, and it worries, not about some measureless past which somehow exists behind us, but about the frayed edges of a dimensionless map whose markings of roads and rivers and events are overlaid, like a series of transparencies, upon the shifting present. Memory starts nowhere, starts anywhere, radiates perhaps from some asterisked city of the mind. Explores and abandons its trails. Writes down lies in indelible ink. Erases the truth. A diary may correspond to a timeline, days following days, but memory toes nobody's line."

Learn more about Mary Clearman Blew by checking this link to an interview with the author.