DATE: Wednesday, November 26, 1997          TAG: 9711250104

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E4   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: BOOK REVIEW 

SOURCE: BY DIANE SCHARPER 

                                            LENGTH:   77 lines

PAINFUL MEMORIES BRING REDEMPTIVE QUALITY

READING ``SURVIVAL Stories: Memoirs of Crisis,'' edited by Kathryn Rhett, is like listening in on someone's life.

``Even during Anna's last hours,'' writes Anna's father, William Loizeaux, ``I believed at some level that if we kept holding her, kept talking, we could keep her alive. And perhaps we did, for a very short time. But the final fact is that Anna did die. She is ashes. She is dead now - incredibly - even as I keep on talking.''

Poet and memoirist Kathryn Rhett is the author of a previous book, ``Near Breathing,'' a memoir of her daughter's difficult birth. She has taught writing workshops at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Iowa and the University of North Carolina.

The idea for this book grew from one of these workshops. Rhett noticed that her students had a need to write about life-changing experiences. Some hoped to use writing as a way to understand the experience better; others wanted to immortalize a loved one; still others wanted to re-create the experience in words.

She also noticed that life-changing experiences could overwhelm a writer. You couldn't assign such memoirs to a novice writer. Nor could you solicit such memoirs from professional writers. These memoirs would have to grow naturally out of a writer's experience and need.

So Rhett selected these 22 memoirs from published autobiographies, from collections of articles and from journals. She wanted established writers, Isabel Allende, Jamaica Kincaid, Reynolds Price and William Styron - to name some. And she wanted prose that had proven itself as intimate, immediate and compelling - qualities easily felt in this collection.

These memoirs make you feel as though you are there, in the text, hearing what's happening as it happens.

Take Maxine Scates' ``The Dreaming Back,'' a memoir of growing up with an alcoholic and abusive father: ``When he is drunk, time stops for him. He cries. He screams I am dying over and over again. He remembers the man he killed in the lumber yard. He remembers the men who died around him in the ship. He remembers how he harmed me and he is sorry. He calls to me `Honey, come here and give me a kiss.' ''

Covering critical points in someone's life - the death of a mother, father, child or sibling; disease; depression; divorce; disfigurement; discrimination - the memoirs, despite the inherent sadness of their subjects, have a redemptive quality. As the title suggests, these authors have survived trauma.

Descriptions of the trauma are unforgettable. Here's Natalie Kusz speaking in ``Vital Signs,'' a memoir of being attacked by dogs: ``The dog snatched and pulled at my mouth, eyes, hair; his breath clouded the air between us, but I did not feel its heat, or smell the blood sinking between hairs of his muzzle. I watched my mitten come off in his teeth and sail upward . . . ''

The circumstances, too, can be unforgettable, as in Christina Middlebrook's ``Witness,'' a cancer memoir. Here she recalls chemotherapy: ``I had not stayed inside my body to suffer the death of every fast-growing cell. My body was a poisoned wreck: all mucous membranes shed, the inside of my mouth and gastrointestinal tract filled with ulcers, eyelids glued shut with blepharitis. In the mornings, I would open my eyes with my fingers.''

Interestingly, most of these authors are poets. Their words don't mean so much as they happen - not on the page but inside. This is the source of their power.

Listen to that power in Isabel Allende's ``Paula,'' a mother's remembrance of her daughter's coma: ``You have been sleeping for a month now. I don't know how to reach you; I call and call but your name is lost in the nooks and crannies of this hospital. . . . I plunge into these pages in an irrational attempt to overcome my terror. I think that perhaps if I give form to this devastation I shall be able to help you, and myself, and that the meticulous exercise of writing can be our salvation.'' MEMO: Diane Scharper is a poet who teaches memoir writing at Towson

University in Maryland. ILLUSTRATION: BOOK REVIEW

``Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis''

Editor: Kathryn Rhett

Publisher: Doubleday. 400 pp.

Price: $24.95

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