Review by Lara Lillibridge
Castles and Ruins is a quiet, ruminative memoir shifting between the narrator’s year in Ireland as a child and her return years later as an adult with her husband and six-year-old son. Rue’s father, Peter Matthiessen, was a celebrated writer, the author of At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and repeated winner of the National Book Award. “His relationship was closest to whatever he was writing at the time, and his family was always second to that.” She clarifies this description, describing him as:
… patrician and liberal, icy and warm, remote and comforting, moth-eaten and elegant, boyish and masterful, in the room with you and one thousand miles away. He rigorously maintained the distance that he needed from anyone who needed something from him.
He worked assiduously for the environment and the rights of people less lucky than himself, but his compassion did not extend to us, the people who had chosen to be with him or landed with him somehow—his family.
Her mother, Deborah Love, penned a book as well ,Annaghkeen, which Rue draws on in her own memoir. Her mother passed away shortly after publishing her book and so it stands in as an answer to the questions she may have about her mother, now that she is a mother as well.
Far from a simpering ode to her mother or her mother’s writing, instead Rue uses it as a jumping off point for her own experience. She’s not afraid to be critical, either, writing, “Annaghkeen has a scholarly tone throughout that assumes the reader has been at least as good a student of European history as my mother was or has a deep background in Christianity.”
It is Rue Matthiessen’s own prose, though, that makes this book so beautifully dream-like.
There are places I could never put a name to that I took with me like a book tucked under my arm. Did I write it? Did Ireland write it for me? A summer in a foreign country turned out to later hold a kind of poetry , a tapestry of impressions that still exists in the far reaches of my imagination.
Although, I can see the echoes of her mother in her writing:
Still, I would like to spend some days around Killarney with time to float down the lakes, watch the changing light on the mountains; breathe, smell, feel the softness, the dampness, the luxuriance, the excessiveness. (Excerpt from Annaghkeen by Deborah Love)
And this trip seems an effort to reconnect with her long-deceased mother, as Rue reminisces,
Our two selves were not the same size, but in the painting I think of her as an equal. She rarely dictated to me, or presented herself as knowing more, or what to do. On these walks, and all throughout the Annaghkeen summer, I had the sense that I was her only ally. We were on a path that it seemed she wouldn’t have chosen, but at least we had each other.
We can sense how important this summer had been to Rue, not knowing that cancer waited to take her mother from her. And as she revisits these places with her own child, there is a feeling of convergence, or at least conversation, between memory and present. We see this reconciliation in lines such as, “It takes a long process of growing up to forgive one’s parents the things they needed, or even understand the things they needed.”
But this trip is not all leprechauns and rainbows—Rue also brings along her mother’s LSD journals, to get to know the real Deborah, not just the polished for public consumption version. “Annaghkeen, opaque and poetic, was the record that my mother wanted to leave, but the journals illuminate what it was like to be Deborah…” Yet, there is another record she has to read—the Sloan-Kettering medical file from her mother’s cancer treatment. In this way, Rue is facing all parts of her mother—the artistic, the wild, the terminally ill.
“I was discovering and remembering things and putting them together in a new storyline that wasn’t aligned with what I had previously chosen to remember.” Rue writes, and it is as much a book about memories and how we remember as it is a book about an individual person’s life.
Castles & Ruins by Rue Matthiessen
Latah Books, Feb 2024
Paperback $19.95
78-1-957607-25
Read Rue Matthiessen’s Author’s Note
Lara Lillibridge (she/they) is the author of The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning; Mama, Mama, Only Mama: An Irreverent Guide for the Newly Single Parent, and Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from West Virginia Wesleyan College.