Lifesaving: A Memoir

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Summary: An Honest, Soulful, Haunting Memoir
Review: "Lifesaving" is a skillfully written memoir that often reads like poetry, and tells an utterly fascinating story. Once I began reading, I couldn't stop. Judith Barrington writes about her first three years after the drowning deaths of her parents in 1963, passengers on the ill-fated cruise ship, Lakonia. And around those core three years Barrington intertwines threads from other chapters of her life that frame the story like a finely crocheted border.

Long after reading the final passages in Barrington's memoir, her images continue to captivate, and yes, haunt me---whether imagining the cold night sea that engulfed her parents, or picturing the author, years later, watching home movies from the 1950s, pushing the pause button to scrutinize and remember her mother's hands.

This memoir also left me ruminating over people and life changing events that I have grappled with in my own life. Judith Barrington's vulnerability and honesty in telling her difficult story are an inspiration for those of us seeking the rawer truths in our own lives.

Rating:
Summary: Gift of Courage
Review: I read Lifesaving - actually, it feels truer to say I went with Barrington to Spain, to her nineteen-year-old life, where I spent the weekend with her, mesmerized and attentive to all she experienced; every choice, each discovery. I feel awed and deeply affected. I am not a writer, but I can see and appreciate how creatively and beautifully Barrington structured her memoir. The places where she intertwines her body/experience with her mother's stunned me. In a way, I feel that the whole book allows the reader to do the same with her, so it becomes the readers' experience, too. It's been good to walk in the territory of the fear of grief with someone who got to the other side. I experience this as a gift of courage. Thank you, Judith Barrington.

Rating:
Summary: Lifesaving
Review: Judith Barrington's Lifesaving achieves a rare balance of narrative restraint and rich storytelling. As a poet,Barrington knows the power of the not-said. She holds us in thrall with the harrowing story of her parents' tragic drowning death when she was nineteen, yet she never retreats to the indulgence or overtelling that characterizes many memoirs crowding shelves today. Instead, in her carefully crafted chapters, we glimpse a young woman's coming of age in Spain in the 1960's, her search for love and a place to belong, her move to America, and her eventual reconciliation with a painful past. Layered through Barrington's story of personal transformation is a meditation on the making of stories and the nature of memory, a thread so subtly woven that we are never forced from our immersion in the story. Lifesaving is a remarkable memoir. I savored it first for the story, then reread it to appreciate the finely-wrought structure.

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Summary: Striking, candid, insightful, articulate, honest.
Review: On December 24, 1963, during a Christmas voyage to the Canary Island, the cruise ship Lakonia, three days out of Southampton, caught fire. In the ensuing confusion and panic a small group of passengers, including Judith Barrington's parents, were left stranded without lifeboats and drowned. Barrington, just nineteen, left England and went to live in a small town in northern Spain. Lifesaving: A Memoir, is her story of those three years, of the people, the places, and a young woman struggling to become an adult in the shadow of sudden and staggering personal loss. Livesaving: A Memoir is a striking, candid, insightful, articulate, honest work that transcends mere autobiography to become a small jewel of enduring and memorable literature.

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Summary: A gorgeous, powerful read
Review: This book is cause for celebration. Judith Barrington writes with refreshing honesty and emotion, and she doesn't take any shortcuts or easy-outs when it comes to dealing with grief, sexuality, and growing up. I came away from "Lifesaving" breathless and moved. A deeply compelling story, it dwells in grief at the same time that it celebrates the life and growth found within it. The writing is subtle and raw. This book prompted me to take up my pen and write again. An underappreciated, relatively unknown gem that I hope more people discover.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing story, lyrically written
Review: This is my idea of how a memoir ought to be written: honest, engaging, revealing, but not at all self obsessed. At the heart of the story is a great loss: the death of the author's parents when she was nineteen, but surrounding that core is a story of a young woman in Spain. It evokes the place and time, it convinces on many levels, and I couldn't put it down. I plan to read it again...

Rating:
Summary: Amazing story, lyrically written
Review: Winner of a Lambda Literary Award, Barrington's memoir chronicles the years after the deaths of her parents during a cruise ship tragedy. Running from her grief, as well as her emerging desires for women, Barrington travels to Spain to work as a tour guide for a winery. There, she submerges herself in her work and in nightly encounters with various men. It's not until many years pass, that Barrington is able to grapple with her grief and visit her parents' grave in Gibraltar. This autobiography is about the struggle to overcome past tragedies and pain, and to finally embrace the full emotional range of one's self in the journey to wholeness. I was rather enchanted with Barrington's style, yet I felt she didn't delve into the depths as much as the memoir warranted. She does address this in the narrative, where she remarks on how people reacted upon hearing of the deaths of her parents at sea. Everyone does deal with tragedy in different ways, and who's to say which is more appropriate?