A new miscellany that includes depictions of his mental illness, reminiscences of peers including Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, Allen Tate and Hannah Arendt, and other twigs and seeds, many seeing print for the first time ... Does the world need Memoirs? ... The argument I will make for Memoirs is this: It’s densely yet nimbly written, and you sense Lowell’s judgment and discrimination in every paragraph. As with nearly everything he wrote, there’s a sense of wheels within wheels ... Memoirs is evocative, and sly, in its assessment of Lowell’s Boston Brahmin family ... This book’s editors, Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, silently and deftly amend, in their footnotes, Lowell’s many small errors of fact, and point out where he seems to have invented characters. There’s a whole other book going on down there in the footnotes ... Reading Memoirs is like finding a roll of undeveloped film from 1954. Lowell rode these sentences into new ways of thinking and writing. There were riddles of existence that, clearly, he was only beginning to shake down.
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