Jonathan Franzen –The Discomfort Zone - rewriting a personal history belongs only to you.

Jonathan Franzen –The Discomfort Zone. Rewriting a personal history. When writing about awkward adolescence JonathanFranzen excels. The title relates so well to this. He has nailed this time of wanting to fit in. He lets us into his life and times. His recollections of his parents and brothers. Looking back from the safety of adulthood. He is able to analyse why his mother reacts to the township ground rules, but is not able to accept a faith in the Christian church. Upon which so many of the townships social and moral standing is based. Jonathan relates a lot of his time in a group called fellowship, but no mention of his own faith. The reader is taken in to this inner sanctum of Franzen’s but as with many memoirists the reader is taken only so far. The tale of how he eventually meets a girl he likes enough to marry seem to be missing. Real insights into this person. A lot of time is spent on relationship blues, but unless we know the person he loves in some measure it is an exercise in anxiety ridden therapy. So nearing the end of the book it seems to abruptly leave his time as a student in Germany, sponging off his parents, and leaps into the therapy session time with relationship angst. We haven’t been let into a large slab of time that leads up to these breakups. So it feels disjointed. The details of the adolescent are not matched by detail in the young adult Franzen. Did he just run out of emotional energy for this? He finishes off talking about his deep love of bird watching that infiltrates his life. Even in this passion Franzen is conflicted about it not being cool enough. But I guess that is what adolescence it is all about, the desperate need to be seen as cool. Franzen spends years trying to work out why he can’t be cool enough. Before heading off in other directions. His ends the book with a personal recollection of finding out how much he loved his mother, but only after she dies. He recalls her deep love of seeing him, when she would say, ‘Tell me, what did you see?’ A mantra for an up and coming writer? We are so shaped by our early life, our parents, our siblings, our school years, our home town. Jonathan takes the time to return to these places and make sense of it. But rewriting history is more compelling, trying to get the answers to fit the questions created in the ensuing time. A memoirist rewrites history, as no one else can write your own inner life with more carefully constructed ‘truths’. My sense of writing a memoir is, get it on paper first. Other people’s memories will inevitably be different. But your own rewrite belongs to only you.