Miriam Sagan

Bluebeard's Castle Miriam Sagan

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Poetry. 'I did love my father for many years, ' Miriam Sagan writes on the first page of BLUEBEARD'S CASTLE, an engaging and probing account of her relationship to her father, a man she calls 'an eccentric misanthrope, ' whose 'tantrums were notorious.' Sagan examines her father's impact on her in prose as balanced and amusing as the 'two equal length lists' she made of everything she hated and everything she loved about him, and in lyrical, mystical poems. The 'cache of memory' she draws from includes learning young to converse with a father who disdained small talk in favor of anthropology and Freudian psychology, and the gangsterish family culture centered on the garment business her father inherited and then left in mid-life (and where, as a girl she selected a new coat each season). The sections that consider her own close call with death in her early 20s, from what may have been swine flu, and the fact that her father's intervention probably saved her life, as well as her descriptions of his disintegration the two years before he died, delve deep. If, as Sagan posits, their relationship was a 'koan, ' that she could never solve, her depiction of it is nuanced and riveting.--Carol Mol