Stop-Time: A Memoir
by Frank Conroy

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Book Reviews of Stop-Time: A Memoir

Book Review: A Beautifully Written Memoir of Growing Up
Summary: 5 Stars

"Stop-Time" tells the story of Frank Conroy's first eighteen years of life, a life marked by the ordinary rather than the lurid or unseemly. But the ordinariness of the life is elevated by the dreamlike, sensitive, asynchronous wonder of Conroy's writing. As Conroy relates in the first chapter of his narrative, in a passage that gives you a feeling for his writing style and for the narrative to follow: "My faith in the firmness of time slips away gradually. I begin to believe that chronological time is an illusion and that some other principle organizes existence. My memories flash like clips of film from unrelated movies."

"Stop-Time" is a stunning example of how great writing can elevate even the most ordinary of lives. The facts of Conroy's memoir are not remarkable. He grew up in relatively poor circumstances, his father died of cancer when he was 12 and lived most of his life apart from Conroy's mother, he spent his time primarily between New York and Florida, and he was a bright boy who performed miserably in school. But while the broad outlines of his life are seemingly unremarkable, Conroy possesses the great gift of the writer: he can focus on the mote of dust floating in the sunlight and take the reader into a world of dreams and memories that are startlingly real, a world that the reader can feel and identify from his or her own recollections of growing up.

Conroy can lie down in a kennel with his family's dogs and dream that he, too, is a dog running through a field. He can relate the fear of being left alone in a cold cabin in the middle of winter while his mother and her boyfriend work the third shift at a state mental institution. He can recall a trip to the carnival with his best friend and how he was cheated and more by a seedy carnie hawker. He can precisely detail learning all the tricks you can do with a yo-yo, and learn them well. And he can recall the tumescent longings of early adolescence, of sneaking and peeking with his cousin and, as he got older, of experiencing, too. It is all related with a feeling, with a literary sense, that would be called "perfect pitch" if it were music.

"Stop-Time" is a remarkably written memoir that not only should be read, but also studied, as a stunning example of how the literary imagination can give vibrant life to the mundane.

Authors Books

• Books > Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature
• Memoirs
• Literature & Fiction > United States > History & Criticism