Devotion
“Graceful tales that make ordinary life extraordinary . . . made of sentences so nearly perfect that they take your breath away.”
Devotion: A Memoir
Miriam Levine
1993
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To Miriam Levine, “devotion” implies love and self-creation; to her mother’s generation, it meant martyrdom and self-denial. The domain of this memoir is the interval between those attitudes. Devotion is the expression of a sensibility that trusts the physical―a facet of women’s existence that is at once ennobling and primary, transcendent and spiritual. Affirming her deep connection to people, Levine draws from a rich expanse of memories, misgivings, epiphanies, and associations to tell of the adventures and dangers of her emergence as a woman writer.
“Creates a gallery of portraits with ghostly vision, guts, and candor . . . Devotion is a splendid book—it will not only make you embrace the author and her family, warts and all, but will awaken and redeem your own memories.”
“Miriam Levine, as her family used to say, was ‘born with a mouthpiece’, by which the forever-dying world is turned into artful speech and made to live again. From a portrait of a syphilitic uncle to a visit to the aging Jean Rhys, this wonderful memoir endows Levine’s world with the second life of art.”
“Particularly perceptive and engaging.”
“Devotion is a compelling coming-of-age story. It enfolds the reader just as a good novel does. In her absorbing memoir, Miriam Levine has also written the intellectual and artistic history of a woman. There is a natural assumption in her book that the materials of a woman’s life count, matter—and are as representative of American life and thought as a man’s. Devotion belongs with Wordsworth’s Prelude, to those works of personal history which document ‘the growth of a poet’s mind.’ The mind, this time, belongs to a woman.”
