My Father's Eyes: a memoir, by Mary Bonina
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My Father's Eyes: a memoir, by Mary Bonina
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Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Set mid-to-late 20th century (with the heart of the book set in the 1950s and '60s), MY FATHER'S EYES is a loving daughter's memoir of a family coming to terms with a legacy of blindness, and a father's heroic efforts to secure independence and dignity. "Not many pages into this gloriously moving book, a feeling begins to grow that it would have been a humbling yet exquisite experience to have sat and talked with Biagio John Bonina. What his daughter Mary Bonina has given us is a solid and lasting portrait of a man who was simple and complicated. (That is not a contradiction once you come to know him.)... America is a country of grand men and women who live on a modest scale, and no one fits that category more than he does. Once his eyes began to fail him, he lived even more for his family and its welfare and his efforts and work make him in my mind, the kind of real hero we fail to glorify anymore. So enter this book and come to know her father and his dedicated overwhelmingly loyal daughter, as well as a large stage of family members and friends who are unforgettable and insanely knowable and human."—Edward P. Jones "Mary Bonina casts her considerable spell with exquisite sentences and unerring evocative details. She is a writer of inordinate compassion, formidable intelligence, and unflinching honesty. MY FATHER'S EYES documents a family's coming to grips with the legacy of blindness, a daughter's unflagging allegiance to her father, and one man's heroic determination to live a life of independence and quiet dignity despite obstacles that would crush the strongest of us. The book is an inspiration. When I finished reading it, I walked around for days seeing the world through its lens. Yes, it's that good. It's that important."—John Dufresne "Packard. Record player. Telephone party line. Fallout shelter. Holy Ghost. These and other blasts from the past make up the world of this beautiful, clear-eyed memoir that reads like a novel. It's partly the story of a girl who loved words on her way to becoming a writer. Of all the words in her universe, the most important were eyes and seeing, for this was a girl growing up with a beloved father going blind. Becoming his guide and his eyes, she becomes herself. And what a character he is! We come to know him as if we're all his children, one minute consumed with terror at the dangers he faces, and the next minute awed by his courage, and the next exasperated by his human flaws. And ultimately, we see and feel for ourselves what his daughter means when she says, 'I know about love from being my father's eyes.'"—Ellen Cooney
My Father's Eyes: a memoir, by Mary Bonina- Amazon Sales Rank: #1274828 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-06-20
- Released on: 2015-06-20
- Format: Kindle eBook
From the Inside Flap In My Father's Eyes, Mary Bonina tells the story of growing up and literally being her father's eyes, doing the seeing for him while he was gradually losing his sight from a genetic retina condition that would eventually leave him totally blind. "You be my eyes," he would say, calling upon her to play the role of "guide," "scout," or "advance girl." Reporting what she saw for her father, she was honing skills that later would be essential to her life as a creative writer. She learned from a young age not just how to describe the material world, but how to read social signals and analyze human interactions, situations, and rooms that were always in flux. Her practice of description served to satisfy and encourage her love of words and the strong visual sense that characterizes her writing. She"had to speak fast and only in a few words," and that surely taught Bonina the importance of economy in language, which became essential to her poetry as well as her prose. In novelistic style, Bonina looks back on her father's resilient personality, explores the challenges he faced, but also what he was able to accomplish in spite of them, highlighting both his courage and his very human flaws. Beginning in the parochial world of the 1950s when Bonina was just six, accompanying her dad the last time he drove a car--his Packard 180 Touring Sedan, his pride and joy--she takes the reader along as she describes so many coming of age experiences in the changing U.S. in the '50s & '60s, while she was trying to understand what blindness is--even trying to mimic what it was like as her father's peripheral vision was diminishing in increments over the years, creating a tunnel effect for seeing. "Gradually, I was able to see the world through a tunnel no bigger than a pencil eraser," she says, making the okay sign with her thumb and index finger, moving them to change the size of the opening through which she could view her world. While change was underway for Bonina's father and her family in the 1960's, the setting for half of the book, it was happening, too in the world around them. Other chapters alternate, taking place decades later when the author is in her early forties, the week her father dies, providing texture, resonance, and becoming the lens for viewing her father's later life, her own, and their relationship as adults. My Father's Eyes is not only a good narrative with a true sense of place, but one that also offers up the richness of language and imagery that you would expect to find in a poet's memoir.
About the Author Mary Bonina has published two collections of poetry, Clear Eye Tea and Living Proof. She is also the author of Lunch in Chinatown, a chapbook of poems inspired by the experience of teaching the English language to recent immigrants in their work places. Her poetry and prose has been featured in Gulf Stream, Salamander, English Journal, Hanging Loose, and many other journals and several anthologies, most recently Entering the Real World: VCCA Poets on Mt. San Angelo, celebrating forty years of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Commissioned by composer Paul Sayed, she wrote a suite of three poems, "Grace in the Wind," and Sayed's composition for piano, cello, and soprano voice had its world premiere at the Longy School of Music of Bard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts in November of 2012. Bonina is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. In addition to being a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow since 2001 when she was named the finalist for the Goldfarb Fellowship in non-fiction, she is also a member of the Writers' Room of Boston, Inc. where she is working on a novel and a new collection of poetry. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, poet Mark Pawlak and their son, Gianni Bonina-Pawlak.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. A Daughter's Protective Love for her Father By Susan Hand My Father's Eyes, a memoir by Mary Bonina, is the extraordinary story of a daughter's relationship with a father who began to go blind when she was a little girl. Bonina took it upon herself to be his "eyes," to not only guide his steps but to illuminate the world for him as they walked about the city. Bonina's love for her gentle, determined father and his sense of responsibility for his family are portrayed with humor, utter honesty, and sometimes with an urgency that leaves you breathless. Family arguments and tough times are not glossed over: Bonina's mother is often exasperated by this family tragedy, and one of Bonina's sisters goes blind also. We see the scope of John Biaggio's life--his brave confrontation of his blindness, his ingenuity in finding a job he can work despite being blind--all the way to his death, when Mary is grown, with a child of her own. We experience life as the family did, in their working class neighborhood of Worcester, all through Mary's eyes. She tells her story in understated and beautiful prose, and she has a poet's unerring eye for the telling details that bring it all to life. Her book is heartbreaking, uplifting, and unforgettable.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. An Affliction of Many Dimensions By Walter Tulp Perhaps this book is too modestly titled. True, it does begin as an account of the author's father and his struggles with failing eyesight, as he falls victim to the hereditary disease of retinitis pigmentosa. In the opening scene he takes the author, a six-year old, for a seemingly harmless ride in the family car. Soon it is revealed that he can barely see the road and almost has a traffic accident. But the book soon develops another dimension, that of Mary Bonina's upbringing and her reactions to the events around her. It is extraordinarily understated, as she reveals how she dealt with her father's encroaching blindness, aided only by juvenile powers of comprehension. In the close-lipped (and close-minded) 50s, they didn't explain much to children, perhaps thinking they couldn't handle adult affairs and needed to be shielded. You were expected to concentrate on your schoolwork and not let anything else bother you. But of course everything did. A rather complex portrait arises around her father, involving his denial and gradual acceptance of his affliction. Bonina also reveals what it was like being educated in Catholic schools in working-class Worcester, MA. She relates incidents of nuns locking schoolchildren in closets as discipline and their "shaking down" of their charges for their candy money, allegedly to send to "the missions of Africa." (Around that time, our parish priest did the same thing, and he drove a Cadillac.)Don't be mistaken: this is no Mary McCarthy-style Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. Bonina recounts these and other events in her life with a refreshing lack of bitterness or sarcasm. She does portray her mother as angry and sharp-tongued, a formerly middleclass woman rejecting the hand she was dealt in life. But she stays with her father throughout because, as Philip Roth says in I Married a Communist, "that's what people do." There are other memorable characters here as well: her conservative Irish grandmother with whom she gets into an imbroglio over watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. (The grandmother hated them because they were English, not because of their music!) Yet soon after she writes how deeply she appreciated her grandmother's generosity when she was growing up. There's the crush-worthy history teacher and the insistent boyfriend. I would've liked more about her interactions with her siblings, particularly her sister Peg, who also developed retinitis pigmentosa. Alternating with the chapters about her girlhood, Bonina inserts ones about her father's last years and death, about thirty years later.This is tour de force of memoir writing-sincere, never maudlin, always intriguing, and occasionally humorous. I liked her attempts to understand adult euphemisms. When her father's blindness had become too obvious, he was "let go" from his factory job. Young Bonina puzzles over this term, which reminded her of a balloon being let go to drift aimlessly in space. The book is full of such sharply remembered insights.I don't know whether Bonina intended it or not, but her cover photo as a young girl is out of focus. The effect is chilling and tugs you into reading her book.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. This Memoir Accomplishes SO Much By AbbisRoad Although memoir is a highly personal and vulnerable medium of storytelling, a good memoir is one that isn't just the story of one person. It transcends the personal and becomes a story that readers can relate to their own lives. I believe this memoir does exactly that. On one level, it is a daughter's account of how she and her family dealt with her father's blindness. It is a beautifully told story that is able to make readers feel as though they are members of the family. If the book were just that story, it would still be incredible, but it isn't. Mary Bonina is able to relate her own story to the larger social and economic issues of the 1950's and 60's. In this memoir, Bonina is able to portray the working class experience in an industrial city on the decline as well as what life was like, at that time and more recently, for people with disabilities. My favorite chapters are those entitled, "Memorial Days." Without giving too much away, they capture how things have changed for Bonina's family since the 1960's. In her memoir, Bonina is able to discuss a defining period in she and her family's lives--her father's blindness truly shaped who Mary Bonina is today--and relate those experiences to the broader social issues of two vastly different time periods--the 1960's and the 1990's. And she does this flawlessly and subtly. This memoir is amazing in how much it is able to accomplish and how well-crafted it is.
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