Facts of Life

by Maureen Howard

Abandoning the conventional chronology of autobiographies, the author groups memories and events around such themes as money, culture, and sex, marking the paths she traveled to discover her own voice and her own art

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Autobiography

192 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1978

About the author

Maureen Howard is the author of seven novels, including Grace Abounding, Expensive Habits, and Natural History, all of which were nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. 'Facts of Life' is an award-winning autobiography. She is a 1952 Smith College alumnae and has taught at a number of American universities, including Columbia, Princeton, Amherst, and Yale, and was recently awarded the Academy Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A warehouse of memory Howard calls her memoir Facts of Life. If you've read her fiction you'll recognize in her autobiography the same rhythms and patterns with which she'd approach a novel, the same concerns with the passage of time, the same enduring ties of family and how the past and who you were is always present. There's a theory of time which posits that all time is and has always been present, like a reel of film, the present revealed one frame at a time. So Howard sees herself as a young woman in spring walking up Madison Avenue. That was 1953. In her "Afterword" she still evokes that same young woman in spring twilight, on the verge of a first marriage.

She divides her memoir into 3 long sections: Culture, Money, Sex. They seem to be about growing up and learning life lessons, education and finding direction, and young adulthood leading to early marriage, children, and divorce. But like her novels, everything is seen through the lens of her family, where she came from. In the last pages her parents are seen from the same perspective as Howard views herself, as a young married parent. The same pea grown in a different yet similar pod. It's brilliant, or almost so. Looking from outside herself, she examines herself as a character. In the end she's resigned to a kind of fate, to the ultimate things she always knew were in her path. As episodic history, neatly warehoused and shelved in packages to be lifted down and explored, rummaged through. None of the packages are transcendent, she says, except the moment the young woman walks up Madison Avenue in heels and a straw hat, the steps resonating clearly in the realization of her true nature. But if there's no transcendence, at least each package lifted down for inspection carries her DNA. All the individual packages make a whole. Each is an incremental step joining every other to become the steady beat of heels on Madison Avenue as that single frame of time illuminates her. Can it really be that meaningful, you ask? Yes, it can. It's a beautifully faceted gem of a book with a sharp, blinding glint.

[Arnie Kahn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite an unusual autobiography, very literary, very unusual in the selections she chooses to write about herself. Two things seem to have dominated her life, her parents and the Catholic church. She comes back to both repeatedly. The former she is highly critical of but madly in love with; of the latter she is just highly critical. She skips over periods other autobiographies might dwell upon--her marriages and divorces, for example. After reading this I feel as though I know her parents a lot better than I know Maureen Howard.

[Betsy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

I saw Maureen Howard's obituary in the NYTimes this month (3/22) and was struck that she was born In Bridgeport, CT, as was I. Her birth fell just halfway between my mother's there--1917-- and mine--1946. I noted that at least one of her novels has Bridgeport in the title. This book is the only the SF library has. Sonoma County has several, which I hope to read when I go up there for the summer.
This one turns out to be a memoir, an unusual one. It's not particularly chronological, rather divide into 3 themes and published in 1975, when she would have been 45.
"Culture" talks about her mother spouting poetry and her high hopes for her children being cultured. Her father was often vulgar and disparaging of all this culture, partly to tease, I think. Howard says that their north side of town was a poor neighborhood. She refers to the crude Irish there, counting her family among them, or escaping them, as well as poor Italians. Birth family dynamics.

"Money" talks about who in her faimly got it and how--jobs and careers. When her grandparents die, the family moves into the large, formal house on North Avenue (where my grandparents lived in a less-grand house), and she comes to understand that her grandfather had made a small fortune out of a horse and cart delivery service and much more about family history

"Sex" chronicles her childhood brushes with romance and kisses, including a birthday party at which she was by far the youngest and the rather perverted mother made them all play spin the bottle. Then her adult life and the way she encountered sex in it, without really describing any of her three marriages in detail.
There was just enough description of Bridgeport to give me what I was looking for, including near the end, a visit to the Big Top Coffee Shop (I remember it as the Pink Elephant) in the Barnum Hotel. What she describes as a mural I remember as a frieze around the top of the walls--a circus parade. What I got in addition was a complex family and keen eye for the ugly and sham, as well as some fine intervals of life.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very unmemoir-ish memoir, but carries over Howard's style from her fiction. Acerbic, self-deprecating, sarcastic, brutal at points, honest, unflinching in her retrospect, compassionate at times but not sentimental, detail-oriented (gluing the legs on her parents old dining room table chairs struck home for me), aware of the passage of time and gleaning the threads through that time.

Some statements had me in awe. The way she unflinchingly skips from one portrait or scene to another can be jarring, but ultimately meaningful. It's not an easy read, but for me it was compelling. I was born much later than she, but there are some overlapping times and connections to a past and much different generation that I connected with: the assumptions about who we should be, the way in which she recognizes the facades that were created, but also the knowledge that they all lead to the present of who we are. Exhilarating, sometimes frustrating, but never a dull moment.

[Edward Champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a solid and often moving memoir marred by the author's relentless and completely unearned snobbery (those hackneyed assaults upon pop culture that were so in vogue during the 1970s but that are now quite embarrassing in 2023). But I mostly loved this book! I like how the memoir matches the divagating nature of memory and how Howard both honored this and returned to the subjects that rose to the top -- namely, her conflicting feelings about her father, a "four-flusher" who turned out to be a parsimonious detective in Bridgeport (these are the best parts of the book). There is graceful subtlety on the subjects of how attitudes about sex and money are planted in childhood and a lot of (then) groundbreaking revelations about being sexually harassed. I did enjoy the gently poetic prose style, but the weird flip-flopping to haughty digressions completely threw me out of that masterful language. I want to be clear that this flaw is not as annoying as what I've seen from other authors (I'm looking at you, Elif "Precious and Unbearable Princess" Batuman), but it did impair what could have been a much greater memoir.

[Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Facts of Life was well written, but I did not get all the New England references and her lifestyle didn't resonate with me. I found the book depressing.

[Joanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was an interesting and sometimes strange autobiography of a woman who grew up in nearby Bridgeport, CT. Her earlier life was a normal and understandable narrative. After she attends Smith, I was sometimes confused on where she was coming from. Gives a good insight into life and times of 1930 – 1960’s.