Lifesaving: A Memoir

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...

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.

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.

"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.

I found this book to be a beautiful account of loss that is written with originality, tenderness, and even humor. These qualities, filtered through the consciousness of Judith Barrington with her genius for astonishingly clear and honest writing, create a portrait of a girl who has lost her moorings and is trying to find a way to save herself. The memoir captures a time when "grief" was not a word anybody said publicly, certainly not in England. When she learns that her parents have died in a terrible accident at sea, Barrington escapes the emotional distance of the British in general and, in particular, her older siblings. She heads directly, though at the time unconsciously, for the place where her parents once spent their happiest times.From the moment we enter Spain, Barrington angles the light so that somehow we are under the intoxicating Spanish sun with her younger self--speeding along in her mother's MG through hilly terrain and meeting a cast of lovable, peculiar, and disturbing characters worthy of a great novel--and at the same time with her older self who is now wise enough to compassionately observe the deep sufferening she was experiencing at the time. She was not one of the flower children of the 1960s on an adventure to experiment with life, but a wholly intelligent and remarkable young woman who was trying to conceal (even from herself) an aching grief beneath a wild youthful attraction to trouble, sex, and danger. She writes every line like a poet, but the overall effect is like a novel. By the end, when she recounts how she finally allowed herself to enter the reality of her parents' deaths, I cried for her both in sadness and in joy.