Someday This Will Fit - Joan Silverman

Memoirs have fascinated me for a long time now, and I find myself reading at least a dozen of them a year. The best of them are as fascinating as even the most melodramatic novels that top the bestseller lists every year before fading away into well-deserved literary oblivion. Memoirs, rather than fading away right on schedule, live on because they are real stories that happen to real people – people just like us – people willing to open their souls to the rest of us. Some writers tell their stories in standalone, one-volume books; others need two, three, four, or more volumes to get the job done. Good memoirs have a different tone than their cousin the autobiography, that first-person, birth-to-present-day chronological accounting of a person’s life. The memoir format grants its authors an almost unlimited freedom to explore incidents, influences, and traumas to a degree that the autobiography format can never match - and that’s why I prefer memoirs to autobiographies. 

But despite all my prior memoir-reading, I don’t recall ever reading one quite like Joan Silverman’s Someday This Will Fit: Linked Essays, Meditations, & Other Midlife Follies. Silverman is an East Coast writer of op-eds, book reviews, essays, and columns whom I had not read before learning of Someday This Will Fit because I simply don’t read newspapers now like I used read them in the good old days prior to the internet. What caught my attention about the book was seeing it described as “an original memoir-in-essays.” Just how is a memoir fan supposed to resist that?

What Silverman has achieved here is really rather remarkable. Someday This Will Fit is not a story about extraordinary events in the life of a person shaped by them or lucky to have survived them. Rather, this is the kind of memoir one would expect from the neighbor down the street, a person busy trying to negotiate her way through everyday life, someone experiencing the same on-the-job training that life throws at all of us. What makes the book so remarkable is that after reading these dozens of short, connected essays, I actually do feel like Joan Silverman is someone who has lived next door to me for the last decade or two.

Silverman has sorted the chosen essays into fifteen distinct aspects of everyday American life: “At Home,” “Habits and Routines,” “Food,” “At Work,” “Health,” “Obsessions,” “He Said, She Said,” “But Who’s Counting,” “Family and Friends,” “Mother Lode,” “Shopping,” “Say, What,” “The Great Outdoors,” “Scents,” and “Departures.” Each section contains five or six page-and-a-half reflections that taken together gradually reveal the real Joan Silverman, a person, as it turns out, who is very much like her readers are likely to be. At only 159 pages (ARC version page-count), this is not a long book, but at about the half-way point, I began to think of Silverman as someone I knew, a person whose views on any given subject were less of a surprise to me than they were like a chat with an old friend over morning coffee. And It certainly doesn’t hurt that Silverman has a fine-tuned sense of humor and that she is not afraid to use sarcasm to make her point – just like all my best friends. 

Review Copy provided by Bauhan Publishing