Yay! Cyra McFadden's memoir is back in print! I had snapped up all the used hardcover editions I could find a few years ago when I heard it was out of print. But why?

Because this slim memoir is the kind of story that unfolds in the reader's head like a gorgeously-shot film, one that's perfectly cast and shot on locations that evoke the internal emotions of its characters to stunning effect. Cher once actually owned the movie rights on this book, then I heard nothing more of it. Her instincts were right on. If there was ever a book that cried out to be adapted into a film or a play, this is it.

McFadden grew up in the West, the daughter of Cy Taillon, a legendary rodeo announcer and his wife Pat, a one-time showgirl with charisma enough to match her husband's. Cyra grew up a little cowgirl gypsy, as the family roamed the Western rodeo circuit together by car in the 1940's.

McFadden's eye for detail in regard to smells, sounds and her childhood consciousness is extaordinary, as is her realistic depiction of her parents' tumultuous love for one another that is the basis of the story and McFadden's adult questing. The smell of cattle, the sonorous voice of her father, the taste of all-hours road food and the touch of sequins on her mother's old costume gowns....this book is filled with details that will linger in your imagination for years. Old family photos accompany the text and they are intimate and haunting. All is told in a voice that is unsparingly honest, as well as sympathetic. McFadden cherishes her vagabond childhood and gives us a technicolor look at the richness of its place and time.

Buy this book if you love a well-written memoir. Or buy it because you love the West. Buy it because you love cowboys and showgirls and all-night trips down dusty highways. But buy it, and many copies of it, because you will want your friends to experience its cinematic poignancy after the movie in your head ends.

Obviously, one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing. Woefully under-read and underappreciated, I encourage English teachers to consider this in a curricula on memoir writing. It is lasting stuff.

This book is hilarious. I've read it to tatters because it's the sort of thing you can pick up, open at random, and spend a pleasant time laughing at the characters who are "slightly off balance yin-and-yangwise but definitely benign". Naturally organic satire at its finest.

The Serial is a soap opera set in Marin County, California. Just north of the Golden Gate bridge it is the affluent epicenter of the self-obsessed. It's the tail end of the decade and the free spirit ideals of the hippy generation have become commodified and trend obsessed: natural fibres and organic produce are de rigueur, radical chic is bought in designer boutiques and everyone talks (without ever really communicating) in the psycho-babble of faddish self-help manuals. Transcendental meditation, personal growth, rebirthing, zen jogging and pet psychiatry are the order of the day. Though everyone in the hip Marin enclave thinks they're liberated and really together, they've simply become an hilarious parody of the straight world they're trying so hard to leave behind. The soap follows Kate and Harvey Holroyd's attempts to keep up with their wacked-out neighbours' fashionable credentials. A year in which they have a trial separation and experiment unsuccessfully with alternative partners and lifestyles.

The book has 52 short (2 page) chapters that my significant other and I found just right to read to each other at bedtime.

The book was often villified by fellow Marinites. Marin County had all of the wacky new age stuff, open marriages, etc., long before the rest of the country did, and this book follows a couple locked deep in the heart of it. Maybe it's not so surprising now, but it was certainly a shocker then. Otherwise, it's a funny blast from the past which means even more to me as I have lived there.

An honest look a fractured family in the American West of the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, this book is about family life, good and bad, in the the settings of rent houses, bars, Cadillacs, motel rooms and rodeo arenas. There is love, estrangement and attempted reconciliation. It's moving as well as interesting, and I'd love for Cyra to write more.