Book #118: I Just Lately Started Buying Wings

Title: I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Other Side of Silence
Author: Kim Dana Kupperman

I read I Just Lately Started Buying Wings for my creative nonfiction seminar, and Kim Kupperman came to my class to talk about her book and lead us through some writing exercises. She even read our essays and gave us some feedback.

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is a series of essays about Kupperman's life, and many center on her relationships with her parents, who divorced shortly after she was born, and engaged in a decade-long custody battle over her. I think there are people who have interesting things happen to and are able to tell a good story because of those unusual life experiences, and there are other people who life relatively common lives and manage to bring life to mundane things (if I ever make it as a writer, I'll fall into the latter category-- I live an entirely boring, calm, and happy life). Kupperman has a story to tell-- the story of a mother who was plagued by mental and physical illnesses and didn't seem able to put aside her own selfishness in order to do what was best for her young daughter, the story of a father who married so many times and seemed ultimately concerned with winning, and the story of the daughter who grew up somewhat scathed from her experiences with these parents.

Kupperman tells her story beautifully. Although the book was meant as a series of essays, and there are essays that deal only tangentially with the central parent-child story, I felt most engaged with the book when reading the essays that dealt with this experience directly. The book wasn't a memoir, but it almost felt like it should have been.