Helen Fremont wrote a memoir and her family metaphorically killed her for it. What’s a writer to do, then, but write another memoir that attempts to understand why? ... [a] crackling second book ... The Escape Artist is a stand-alone work. Graceful, gracious and, with the exception of a few vamping detours, an engrossing tour through a dense, if troubling, landscape. Still, the portrait accrues meaning when viewed as a palimpsest. There are fresh revelations in the second book that illuminate events in the first. They make sense of some of the madness, and deepen the reader’s compassion for an already compassion-worthy clan. It feels worth noting that, in After Long Silence, Fremont elided many facts. She did so at the behest of a family by which she still hoped to be embraced. The Escape Artist, then, as the title suggests, is Fremont unbound. And yet the book’s very existence confirms a stubborn, and more global, truth: When it comes to family, you’re never truly free.
This tragic and unsettling (but also humorous and wry) memoir opens with an event that becomes the impetus of Fremont’s attempt to make sense of it all. Weeks after attending her father’s funeral, she receives a letter informing her of her own disinheritance ... No one could accuse the family in The Escape Artist of keeping only small secrets, but in its truth-telling, it serves as a catharsis for anyone who has ever spent time hiding the skeletons of others.
In openly confronting the consequences of telling family stories — twice, after bad results the first time! — Fremont takes the reader along with her on the risky moon shot that is family memoir. With this eloquent guide, it is a difficult tour worth taking.
Fremont...continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family ... Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression ... Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work ... The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir ... A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
