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MY LITERARY PROFILE: A MEMOIR BY PILIBOSIAN, HELENE
Kirkus Reviews (Print)
January 8, 2015, Thursday
NONFICTION; Memoir
In this debut memoir, an Armenian-American woman details her family
background, health issues, and literary education and craft.Pilibosian
was born in 1933 to survivors of the Armenian genocide. Her memoir
leads off with "the background our lives were played against, the
Armenian lives of my parents before they had immigrated, and our
Armenian or American lives here." She then largely shifts to her
saga of growing up in an Armenian-American community in Watertown,
Massachusetts.
Since she was shy and "lacked ambition to go to college though my
marks in school were very good," Pilibosian went to secretarial
school but soon also took humanities courses through Harvard's
Division of Continuing Education, ultimately earning a "bachelor
equivalent" degree. Early in adulthood, Pilibosian also experienced
depression that required psychotherapy and shock treatments. She
married an Armenian man, whom her parents recommended and who worked
as a typesetter, and she traveled abroad with him as part of trips
to visit his family in Lebanon. She gave birth to two children,
got editorial work at an Armenian-American newspaper and the Harvard
University Printing Office, and wrote poetry that got published. As a
young mother, she experienced cardiac arrest during routine surgery,
resulting in four days of lost consciousness. Later, in middle age,
while walking in a cemetery, she experienced a mystical lifting of
mood. Now in retirement, she and her husband run the small press
they founded, and her memoir concludes with a discussion of poetry
and other writing. Pilibosian sets out to cover a lot of ground in
this expansive memoir. Her overview of Armenian cultural history and
descriptions of literary studies hold some interest, though at times
they also sit rather awkwardly alongside the underlying drama of her
medical and mental health issues, which remain a bit mysterious.
Pilibosian clearly loves poetry, and her discussions in this area
represent some of the more heartfelt expressions in this book. Indeed,
there's something rather haunting about this somewhat stilted memoir,
with Pilibosian acknowledging that only later in life did she learn the
value of humor, "because my upbringing had been humorless."Ambitious
amalgam of ethnic and personal history.
Publication Date: 2010-06-01 Publisher: Ohan Press Stage: Indie ISBN:
978-1929966080 Price: $15.00 Author: Pilibosian, Helene
Kirkus Reviews (Print)
January 8, 2015, Thursday
NONFICTION; Memoir
In this debut memoir, an Armenian-American woman details her family
background, health issues, and literary education and craft.Pilibosian
was born in 1933 to survivors of the Armenian genocide. Her memoir
leads off with "the background our lives were played against, the
Armenian lives of my parents before they had immigrated, and our
Armenian or American lives here." She then largely shifts to her
saga of growing up in an Armenian-American community in Watertown,
Massachusetts.
Since she was shy and "lacked ambition to go to college though my
marks in school were very good," Pilibosian went to secretarial
school but soon also took humanities courses through Harvard's
Division of Continuing Education, ultimately earning a "bachelor
equivalent" degree. Early in adulthood, Pilibosian also experienced
depression that required psychotherapy and shock treatments. She
married an Armenian man, whom her parents recommended and who worked
as a typesetter, and she traveled abroad with him as part of trips
to visit his family in Lebanon. She gave birth to two children,
got editorial work at an Armenian-American newspaper and the Harvard
University Printing Office, and wrote poetry that got published. As a
young mother, she experienced cardiac arrest during routine surgery,
resulting in four days of lost consciousness. Later, in middle age,
while walking in a cemetery, she experienced a mystical lifting of
mood. Now in retirement, she and her husband run the small press
they founded, and her memoir concludes with a discussion of poetry
and other writing. Pilibosian sets out to cover a lot of ground in
this expansive memoir. Her overview of Armenian cultural history and
descriptions of literary studies hold some interest, though at times
they also sit rather awkwardly alongside the underlying drama of her
medical and mental health issues, which remain a bit mysterious.
Pilibosian clearly loves poetry, and her discussions in this area
represent some of the more heartfelt expressions in this book. Indeed,
there's something rather haunting about this somewhat stilted memoir,
with Pilibosian acknowledging that only later in life did she learn the
value of humor, "because my upbringing had been humorless."Ambitious
amalgam of ethnic and personal history.
Publication Date: 2010-06-01 Publisher: Ohan Press Stage: Indie ISBN:
978-1929966080 Price: $15.00 Author: Pilibosian, Helene