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The Part That Burns
In her fiercely beautiful memoir, Jeannine Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically to witness each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping and her mother’s erratic behavior, Ouellette lives for the day she can become a mother herself and create her own sheltering family. But she cannot know how the visceral reality of both birth and babies will pull her back into the body she long ago abandoned, revealing new layers of pain and desire, and forcing her to choose between her idealistic vision of perfect marriage and motherhood, and the birthright of her own awakening flesh, unruly and alive. The Part That Burns is a story about the tenacity of family roots, the formidable undertow of trauma, and the rebellious and persistent yearning of human beings for love from each other.
- GenresMemoirNonfiction
123 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 4, 2021
42 people are currently reading
1951 people want to read
About the author
Jeannine Ouellette
8 books75 followersJeannine Ouellette’s debut memoir, The Part That Burns, was a Kirkus Top 100 Indie Book of 2021 and a finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award in Women's Literature and has been praised by Dorothy Allison, Joyce Carol Oates, Marion Winik, Melissa Febos, Gina Frangello, Sue William Silverman, and many others. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, LA Review of Books, North American Review, Masters Review, Penn Review, and more, as well as in many anthologies, including Ms. Aligned: Women Writing About Men; Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives; and Passed On: Daughters Write About Father Loss, Lack, and Legacy. A fellow of Millay Colony for the Arts and Brush Creek Foundation, Jeannine teaches creative writing through Catapult, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, The University of Minnesota, and Elephant Rock, an independent program she founded in 2012. She is working on her first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 96 reviews
October 29, 2020
Elegant and devastating, THE PART THAT BURNS is as tender as a bruise but with all the hope and beauty that comes with the slow process of healing.
October 30, 2020
WOW something about this book grabbed me and hasn’t let me go. Original voice with a striking story of resilience and the mess that is life. Definitely recommending to my book group!
December 1, 2020
What do you remember? What do you choose to forget? Author Jeannine Ouellette describes The Part That Burns as “a memoir in fragments.” That’s an accurate assessment of the way memory works. (Think back on your own childhood. Do you remember the scenes that had an emotional impact on you? Do you sense that the day-to-day memories have faded? Have you embellished or rewritten any scenes from your life?)
Ouellette records the memorable scenes of her life as she remembers them, creating an exquisite patchwork of people, places, and dogs. Her family includes Mama, a younger sister named Rachel, Daddy Jack, a step-dad named Mafia, several boyfriends, a husband, and a daughter. Her family travels from Duluth to Wyoming to other locations, and she starts her story with the family dogs and the memories they bring up. The dogs, the daddies, and her shifting relationships with Mama and Rachel are all part of a time-line that shifts back and forth as she remembers new levels of misunderstanding and abuse.
Readers will appreciate that as the story goes deeper as we watch her cope with the dysfunction caused by poverty, an unstable mother, shifting father figures, sexual frustrations, and the love her daughter brings.
The author writes in vivid poetic prose. Talking about her daughter Sophie, Ouellette says:
Maybe healing, when it happens, is the result of a quantum entanglement, the swirling of a thousand winds. Maybe it comes when you give your daughter your own heart like another stuffed toy she will drag with her everywhere, clenching it in her baby fists whenever she screams in fear or sadness or pain, soaring through the air with it as she jumps from a swing at the highest possible point in the July sky, stuffing it into her backpack as she skulks off to high school on a bad day, locking herself away with it, broken, when her first love leaves her.
The love she never felt from her parents blossoms as she cares for her daughter.
No one is perfect, of course. “Sometimes Sophie bites.” Like life, an astute reader might say. Life is a series of opposites, a fact the author confirms when she states, “The part that burns is the part that glows.” Good and bad, power and weakness, courage and fear all compete for attention.
The conclusion, written by the author and her daughter in alternating voices, confirms that opposites not only exist but also attract one another. Life is complex, and her beautifully rendered story confirms this. It’s a short, immediate, and powerful account of coming to terms with what life has dealt you and how you handle it. Both Jeannine Ouellette and her daughter Lillian Ouellette-Howitz are authors worth watching.
The book will be released in February of 2021 by Split Lip Press, but good literary citizens can pre-order, which is a boost for the author and the publisher.
Story Circle Book Reviews thanks B. Lynn Goodwin for this review.
Ouellette records the memorable scenes of her life as she remembers them, creating an exquisite patchwork of people, places, and dogs. Her family includes Mama, a younger sister named Rachel, Daddy Jack, a step-dad named Mafia, several boyfriends, a husband, and a daughter. Her family travels from Duluth to Wyoming to other locations, and she starts her story with the family dogs and the memories they bring up. The dogs, the daddies, and her shifting relationships with Mama and Rachel are all part of a time-line that shifts back and forth as she remembers new levels of misunderstanding and abuse.
Readers will appreciate that as the story goes deeper as we watch her cope with the dysfunction caused by poverty, an unstable mother, shifting father figures, sexual frustrations, and the love her daughter brings.
The author writes in vivid poetic prose. Talking about her daughter Sophie, Ouellette says:
Maybe healing, when it happens, is the result of a quantum entanglement, the swirling of a thousand winds. Maybe it comes when you give your daughter your own heart like another stuffed toy she will drag with her everywhere, clenching it in her baby fists whenever she screams in fear or sadness or pain, soaring through the air with it as she jumps from a swing at the highest possible point in the July sky, stuffing it into her backpack as she skulks off to high school on a bad day, locking herself away with it, broken, when her first love leaves her.
The love she never felt from her parents blossoms as she cares for her daughter.
No one is perfect, of course. “Sometimes Sophie bites.” Like life, an astute reader might say. Life is a series of opposites, a fact the author confirms when she states, “The part that burns is the part that glows.” Good and bad, power and weakness, courage and fear all compete for attention.
The conclusion, written by the author and her daughter in alternating voices, confirms that opposites not only exist but also attract one another. Life is complex, and her beautifully rendered story confirms this. It’s a short, immediate, and powerful account of coming to terms with what life has dealt you and how you handle it. Both Jeannine Ouellette and her daughter Lillian Ouellette-Howitz are authors worth watching.
The book will be released in February of 2021 by Split Lip Press, but good literary citizens can pre-order, which is a boost for the author and the publisher.
Story Circle Book Reviews thanks B. Lynn Goodwin for this review.
June 1, 2025
A poetic memoir that weaves together threads of innocence lost, traumas survived, and, ultimately, the bodily experience of breaking into jagged pieces and putting the pieces back together, with love as the glue. It presents a life remembered in fragments, arranged in different overlapping formations, filled with vivid imagery and told in delicious prose. The narrative is nonlinear, and yet (unlike some experimental prose that I find pretentious and alienating) it loops and swirls in ways that feel intuitive, sort of like the natural movement of wind, or water, or human memory.
January 10, 2021
In the quiet of my home, while reading this book, I found myself talking to it. I'd occasionally surprise myself when hearing my voice say, "noooo" or "wow" or when I'd erupt into a shout of laughter or a groan of dismay.
In short, it transported me. It transported me with visceral and concise language that allowed the stories to unspool themselves into my mind's eye. Also, its clarity of experience and the craft of empathy transported me into that space that is most tender near the bone, where our humanity can both bind and betray us to each other. This book is beautiful, enrapturing, and a powerful hymn to survival surrendering itself to blossoming.
In short, it transported me. It transported me with visceral and concise language that allowed the stories to unspool themselves into my mind's eye. Also, its clarity of experience and the craft of empathy transported me into that space that is most tender near the bone, where our humanity can both bind and betray us to each other. This book is beautiful, enrapturing, and a powerful hymn to survival surrendering itself to blossoming.
May 29, 2021
A book about memory and whether we pass on trauma to our children. Ouellette cleverly jumps time in the way she writes sections of her traumatic childhood memories, the men she knew, the husband she left, and the children she had. I liked how this structure echoed how memory also jumps and is not linear. The writing is beautiful, with many perfect metaphors. My favourite section by far was her time with her husband when her children were young. After this, we hear the voice of one of her children, as well as her own, and this didn't work quite so well for me.
June 4, 2024
Honest, direct, and painful - the prose grabs you and won’t let go. A gripping exploration of trauma and redemption. You can read my full review here: https://www.theliteraryreview.org/boo...
Update: The Literary Review seems to have closed or are reorganizing their website. Full review pasted here:
A glance down the table of contents of The Part That Burns: A Memoir in Fragments, by Jeannine Ouellette, immediately shows the reader how Ouellette has chosen to organize her work. Here we see the material from which Ouellette has built a narrative and, in the process, attempted to unpack her trauma before it unraveled her. Chapter titles reveal the narrator’s love of animals, “Four Dogs, Maybe Five”; nature, “Tumbleweed”; her children, “Baby Girl”; as well as what might be called the working thesis as well as the title, “The Part That Burns,” which winds up being not a single, burning part, but multiple parts, all of them intense and fiery: abuse, childbirth, unwanted but obligatory-seeming sex after childbirth, child-rearing, a mother’s betrayal, and, ultimately, the recognition that the human body can and does rise to the challenges it is given. After all, as the narrator reminds us, “The part that burns is the part that glows.”
Ouellette’s memoir deals with “Trauma” with a capital T, as well as with the myriad lower-case traumas that humans experience as part and parcel of being alive. In the exploration of the abuse, it has echoes of the memoirs of Mary Karr, Jeannette Walls, and Tara Westover, as well as the semi-autobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina, whose author, Dorothy Allison, Ouellette cites as an influence, and who has said this about Ouellette’s work: "I love this book and am grateful it is in the world." This reviewer agrees wholeheartedly.
Told in fragments with narrators that range from a young girl to a nervous ninth grader, from a brand-new wife and mother to an older, divorced woman with adult children, The Part That Burns is a meditation on healing and resiliency in the face of the harm and havoc wreaked by others—some intentional, some situational, all hurtful. In a particularly cutting scene, we witness Ouellette’s narrator being terrorized by her mother, who, at the point before Ouellette and her younger sister are taken to foster care, tells her daughter “I should have aborted you when I had the chance.” The mother hurls a variety of kitchen objects at her daughter’s head: a ceramic jug, a cast-iron pan, an electric mixer. The Trauma with a capital T, it turns out, is not only the mother’s emotional and physical abuse: there is also the sexual abuse foisted upon Ouellette’s four-year-old self by her mother’s second husband, a man they all call Mafia: “Mafia doesn’t like me, except for the tickling game. It goes like this: Mafia chases me, I run. He catches me, I yell and shriek. He tickles me—under my arms and behind my knees, under my chin and between my ribs. I shriek more. He pulls my clothes off and puts me on his lap and rubs his hands between my legs. When he stops, the game is over. That’s how it works.”
That these narrators maintain such objectivity throughout this book is testament, no doubt, both to the extent of Ouellette’s healing and to her commitment to her craft: whole passages beg to be read again and again for their lyricism, humility, and beauty. “Maybe healing, when it happens, is the result of a quantum entanglement, the swirling of a thousand winds. Maybe it comes when you give your daughter your own heart like another stuffed toy she will drag with her everywhere, clenching it in her baby fists whenever she screams in fear or sadness or pain, soaring through the air with it as she jumps from a swing at the highest possible point in the July sky, stuffing it into her backpack as she skulks off to high school on a bad day, locking herself away with it, broken, when her first love leaves her.”
The younger and older narrators alike find solace in nature, and the book places the reader right in the middle of frigid, Minnesota winters—a frozen Lake Superior ringed with ice- and snow-swept beaches, sweating beneath heavy woolens on a city bus, and general urban slush—as well as the desolate stretches of Casper, Wyoming, where Jeannine is both repulsed and captivated by the humble tumbleweed. A tumbleweed, she writes, “is a plant known as a diaspore. Once mature, it dries and detaches from its root and tumbles away.” The young Ouellette is both the tumbleweed and the “tender [and] thirsty…baby grass” that her mother and Mafia expect her to keep alive after seeding their Casper front yard. The narrator doesn’t push these metaphors, however. She is wise enough to leave them for the reader to draw our own, painful conclusions—how this tender babe was as helpless as the grass—with her needs similarly unmet—and as untethered as the tumbleweed—grasping at and wildly clinging to anything it found.
A clear, unflinching eye—whether aimed at the Trauma inflicted upon her or the trauma she extends to her husband and daughter—means the reader can trust this narrator. In one scene, when an adult Ouellette is trying to impress her still-neglectful mother with the successful trappings of her life—her new husband and their “galloping mare of a [toddler] daughter,” she also wants desperately for her mother to see how calmly she, as a new mother herself, deals with her daughter Sophie’s biting. But then she confesses to the reader: “And even on those few times when I have lost my temper and raised my voice, yelled that biting is not okay, is bad, and pulled Sophie off of me too roughly, yanked her doughy arm too hard, tried to hurt her just a little, I didn’t mean it, not at all, and I won’t ever defend myself for those times.” In the chapter about the dissolution of her marriage, she admits: “I used to emphasize how I didn’t have an affair. Technically, I didn’t. I used to emphasize that what happened was more than attraction. I fell in love. Now, I know that’s worse.” The narrator is as clear and unflinching here as she is in scenes of her own abuse, even though both narrator and reader know it’s a false parallel between the experiences.
The conclusion, written in alternating voices of the author and her daughter, reminds us of our interconnectedness—as mothers and daughters yes, but also more broadly as humans, in the shared experiences of all beings. Traditional Buddhism teaches that trying to control our experiences—whether past or future—is not only impossible, but destructive. Rather, the goal of being human is to connect deeply to things as they are, and, in doing so, to work through individual pain to arrive at a most fundamental resting place of wholeness, love, and healing. As Ouellette’s narrator shows us, the work of healing ourselves is perhaps the greatest gift we can extend to others. Like a good meditation practice, it is the work of this book to observe the physical facts of a life without judgement, knowing that, if we can be patient, we will eventually find inner stability and acceptance, even when, or especially when, the external world erupts in chaos.
Update: The Literary Review seems to have closed or are reorganizing their website. Full review pasted here:
A glance down the table of contents of The Part That Burns: A Memoir in Fragments, by Jeannine Ouellette, immediately shows the reader how Ouellette has chosen to organize her work. Here we see the material from which Ouellette has built a narrative and, in the process, attempted to unpack her trauma before it unraveled her. Chapter titles reveal the narrator’s love of animals, “Four Dogs, Maybe Five”; nature, “Tumbleweed”; her children, “Baby Girl”; as well as what might be called the working thesis as well as the title, “The Part That Burns,” which winds up being not a single, burning part, but multiple parts, all of them intense and fiery: abuse, childbirth, unwanted but obligatory-seeming sex after childbirth, child-rearing, a mother’s betrayal, and, ultimately, the recognition that the human body can and does rise to the challenges it is given. After all, as the narrator reminds us, “The part that burns is the part that glows.”
Ouellette’s memoir deals with “Trauma” with a capital T, as well as with the myriad lower-case traumas that humans experience as part and parcel of being alive. In the exploration of the abuse, it has echoes of the memoirs of Mary Karr, Jeannette Walls, and Tara Westover, as well as the semi-autobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina, whose author, Dorothy Allison, Ouellette cites as an influence, and who has said this about Ouellette’s work: "I love this book and am grateful it is in the world." This reviewer agrees wholeheartedly.
Told in fragments with narrators that range from a young girl to a nervous ninth grader, from a brand-new wife and mother to an older, divorced woman with adult children, The Part That Burns is a meditation on healing and resiliency in the face of the harm and havoc wreaked by others—some intentional, some situational, all hurtful. In a particularly cutting scene, we witness Ouellette’s narrator being terrorized by her mother, who, at the point before Ouellette and her younger sister are taken to foster care, tells her daughter “I should have aborted you when I had the chance.” The mother hurls a variety of kitchen objects at her daughter’s head: a ceramic jug, a cast-iron pan, an electric mixer. The Trauma with a capital T, it turns out, is not only the mother’s emotional and physical abuse: there is also the sexual abuse foisted upon Ouellette’s four-year-old self by her mother’s second husband, a man they all call Mafia: “Mafia doesn’t like me, except for the tickling game. It goes like this: Mafia chases me, I run. He catches me, I yell and shriek. He tickles me—under my arms and behind my knees, under my chin and between my ribs. I shriek more. He pulls my clothes off and puts me on his lap and rubs his hands between my legs. When he stops, the game is over. That’s how it works.”
That these narrators maintain such objectivity throughout this book is testament, no doubt, both to the extent of Ouellette’s healing and to her commitment to her craft: whole passages beg to be read again and again for their lyricism, humility, and beauty. “Maybe healing, when it happens, is the result of a quantum entanglement, the swirling of a thousand winds. Maybe it comes when you give your daughter your own heart like another stuffed toy she will drag with her everywhere, clenching it in her baby fists whenever she screams in fear or sadness or pain, soaring through the air with it as she jumps from a swing at the highest possible point in the July sky, stuffing it into her backpack as she skulks off to high school on a bad day, locking herself away with it, broken, when her first love leaves her.”
The younger and older narrators alike find solace in nature, and the book places the reader right in the middle of frigid, Minnesota winters—a frozen Lake Superior ringed with ice- and snow-swept beaches, sweating beneath heavy woolens on a city bus, and general urban slush—as well as the desolate stretches of Casper, Wyoming, where Jeannine is both repulsed and captivated by the humble tumbleweed. A tumbleweed, she writes, “is a plant known as a diaspore. Once mature, it dries and detaches from its root and tumbles away.” The young Ouellette is both the tumbleweed and the “tender [and] thirsty…baby grass” that her mother and Mafia expect her to keep alive after seeding their Casper front yard. The narrator doesn’t push these metaphors, however. She is wise enough to leave them for the reader to draw our own, painful conclusions—how this tender babe was as helpless as the grass—with her needs similarly unmet—and as untethered as the tumbleweed—grasping at and wildly clinging to anything it found.
A clear, unflinching eye—whether aimed at the Trauma inflicted upon her or the trauma she extends to her husband and daughter—means the reader can trust this narrator. In one scene, when an adult Ouellette is trying to impress her still-neglectful mother with the successful trappings of her life—her new husband and their “galloping mare of a [toddler] daughter,” she also wants desperately for her mother to see how calmly she, as a new mother herself, deals with her daughter Sophie’s biting. But then she confesses to the reader: “And even on those few times when I have lost my temper and raised my voice, yelled that biting is not okay, is bad, and pulled Sophie off of me too roughly, yanked her doughy arm too hard, tried to hurt her just a little, I didn’t mean it, not at all, and I won’t ever defend myself for those times.” In the chapter about the dissolution of her marriage, she admits: “I used to emphasize how I didn’t have an affair. Technically, I didn’t. I used to emphasize that what happened was more than attraction. I fell in love. Now, I know that’s worse.” The narrator is as clear and unflinching here as she is in scenes of her own abuse, even though both narrator and reader know it’s a false parallel between the experiences.
The conclusion, written in alternating voices of the author and her daughter, reminds us of our interconnectedness—as mothers and daughters yes, but also more broadly as humans, in the shared experiences of all beings. Traditional Buddhism teaches that trying to control our experiences—whether past or future—is not only impossible, but destructive. Rather, the goal of being human is to connect deeply to things as they are, and, in doing so, to work through individual pain to arrive at a most fundamental resting place of wholeness, love, and healing. As Ouellette’s narrator shows us, the work of healing ourselves is perhaps the greatest gift we can extend to others. Like a good meditation practice, it is the work of this book to observe the physical facts of a life without judgement, knowing that, if we can be patient, we will eventually find inner stability and acceptance, even when, or especially when, the external world erupts in chaos.
December 2, 2020
Lines from this book keep popping into my head. Little reminders! Little calls to action and healing and vulnerability! Ouellette's The Part That Burns is urgent and expertly crafted. Her honest depiction of hurt and healing left me thinking of the buddhist meditative practice of tonglen, as described by Pema Chodron, "when we see or feel suffering, we breathe in with the notion of completely feeling it, accepting it, and owning it... Then we breathe out, radiating compassion, lovingkindness, freshness—anything that encourages relaxation and openness. So you’re training in softening, rather than tightening, your heart." Reading The Part That Burns brought me a real sense of hope and beauty and sorrow, and courage, too. I cannot wait to read whatever Jeannine Ouellette comes out with next. Thank you for sharing your story and prose with the world <3
January 26, 2021
"The part that burns also glows." Not since reading BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA have I felt so seen and moved and wowed.
I'm sad and angry that Ouellette and I share a history of childhood sexual abuse, and more. I'm heartened and amazed by her resilience and brilliance, and the defiant, graceful beauty she's wrought from the brutal.
Through its notable brevity, structure, prose, subtlety, nuance, layers, wisdom, and compassion, THE PART THAT BURNS is a master class in memoir, and living.
I loved it.
I'm sad and angry that Ouellette and I share a history of childhood sexual abuse, and more. I'm heartened and amazed by her resilience and brilliance, and the defiant, graceful beauty she's wrought from the brutal.
Through its notable brevity, structure, prose, subtlety, nuance, layers, wisdom, and compassion, THE PART THAT BURNS is a master class in memoir, and living.
I loved it.
January 24, 2021
What an extraordinary, unexpected delight. I was stunned by the precision of detail and voice in this fractured memoir. Characters are deftly, tenderly, rendered, yet Ouellette's attention also smolders, eviscerates. These are stories felt deep in the body, and will remain with me for a long time.
February 12, 2021
This memoir is gorgeous and heartbreaking and startling, and I'm going to be thinking about it for a long time.
February 12, 2021
Reading The Part That Burns by the brilliant Jeannine Ouellette is like being pulled into a dream, or a song. It’s a hard story told with open-heartedness and generosity, without melodrama or manipulation, about the person she once was and is still becoming.
“Mom taught us that when small things go missing— her favorite hairbrush with its yellowed bristles, her wide black comb, her silver sewing scissors—you look for those things until you find them. “Look harder,” she would say. “Use your goddamn eyes.” But when big things go missing—men, houses, dogs—you don’t ask questions. You don’t mention it again. You simply move on.”
She learns that it’s no use, you can’t move on without looking back. In each chapter we move ahead with her and circle back, perhaps not a circle but a spiral, each time seeing something new and ending up at somewhere new, life moving forward and backward, in and out, around and through.
“It takes so long to become anything. Especially yourself,” Ouellette writes.
You can’t help but care. You can’t resist the enchantment of Ouellette’s story-telling. You can’t help but love the little girl searching for portals amid the tumbleweeds of the desert. The ninth-grade girl writing an autobiography filled with perfect lies about her perfect life. The sixteen-year-old girl, kicked out of her home for the last time before she goes to foster care, traveling alone from Minnesota to Mexico to look for the one person who promised she would always have a home. The young wife who lets her husband preen, believing he brought her to orgasm nine times in a row—lucky nine! The young woman working to bring an old house back to life, trying to create the stability she never had. A mother herself, still facing the hard truth that her own mother will not come through for her, not in the way she comes through for her dog, never in the way the narrator come throughs for her own.
There is no moral of the story, no easy answers, just someone living her life, meeting her selves with tenderness and curiosity, her heart open to herself and to us.
She writes, “All along, I would give Sophie the best thing I had, other than my love, which was my words.” Jeannine Ouellette has done the same for us, giving us her the best thing she has, her words.
“Mom taught us that when small things go missing— her favorite hairbrush with its yellowed bristles, her wide black comb, her silver sewing scissors—you look for those things until you find them. “Look harder,” she would say. “Use your goddamn eyes.” But when big things go missing—men, houses, dogs—you don’t ask questions. You don’t mention it again. You simply move on.”
She learns that it’s no use, you can’t move on without looking back. In each chapter we move ahead with her and circle back, perhaps not a circle but a spiral, each time seeing something new and ending up at somewhere new, life moving forward and backward, in and out, around and through.
“It takes so long to become anything. Especially yourself,” Ouellette writes.
You can’t help but care. You can’t resist the enchantment of Ouellette’s story-telling. You can’t help but love the little girl searching for portals amid the tumbleweeds of the desert. The ninth-grade girl writing an autobiography filled with perfect lies about her perfect life. The sixteen-year-old girl, kicked out of her home for the last time before she goes to foster care, traveling alone from Minnesota to Mexico to look for the one person who promised she would always have a home. The young wife who lets her husband preen, believing he brought her to orgasm nine times in a row—lucky nine! The young woman working to bring an old house back to life, trying to create the stability she never had. A mother herself, still facing the hard truth that her own mother will not come through for her, not in the way she comes through for her dog, never in the way the narrator come throughs for her own.
There is no moral of the story, no easy answers, just someone living her life, meeting her selves with tenderness and curiosity, her heart open to herself and to us.
She writes, “All along, I would give Sophie the best thing I had, other than my love, which was my words.” Jeannine Ouellette has done the same for us, giving us her the best thing she has, her words.
January 24, 2021
Jeannine Ouellette’s memoir in fragments, The Part That Burns, reads like a shattered mirror that the author reassembles as you go, pulled forward by writing that’s precise and beautiful both in its parts and as a whole.
Often when I read I mark sentences that shine, soar, stop me in my tracks with their potency. A good book usually has a handful, a great book more than that. This book has so many it’s hard to pull them out. I searched for a line or two that I might share here, but find myself highlighting entire paragraphs. Beyond this, the fragmented structure Ouellette employs to tell this story is itself masterful and compelling.
Ouellette spans the time between her own childhood and motherhood, sharing potent memories of herself as child, daughter, mother, and the places in between, as well as the intersections between all these selves. I think again of mirrors, the ones in the fun house at the fair, where you see many reflections from many angles, some distortions of who we are, some closer to reality, but all real in that place in time, from our perspective as we look at what we see in the panels around us.
Make no mistake: this narrator’s voice is clear and true, and you’ll want to know where she goes next. You’ll hold your breath at times, and you’ll pull for her to reach her destinations safely.
A story of childhood sexual abuse, a story of a girl who journeys and survives, eventually thrives, this is not the usual memoir with this subject at its core. It’s a map of the path this narrator took, not in sequence, but the way you would hear it if she told it to a friend, or a therapist, in remembered pieces, so you come to the whole almost by surprise, with a little gasp of wow as you see where she ends up.
Very highly recommended.
Often when I read I mark sentences that shine, soar, stop me in my tracks with their potency. A good book usually has a handful, a great book more than that. This book has so many it’s hard to pull them out. I searched for a line or two that I might share here, but find myself highlighting entire paragraphs. Beyond this, the fragmented structure Ouellette employs to tell this story is itself masterful and compelling.
Ouellette spans the time between her own childhood and motherhood, sharing potent memories of herself as child, daughter, mother, and the places in between, as well as the intersections between all these selves. I think again of mirrors, the ones in the fun house at the fair, where you see many reflections from many angles, some distortions of who we are, some closer to reality, but all real in that place in time, from our perspective as we look at what we see in the panels around us.
Make no mistake: this narrator’s voice is clear and true, and you’ll want to know where she goes next. You’ll hold your breath at times, and you’ll pull for her to reach her destinations safely.
A story of childhood sexual abuse, a story of a girl who journeys and survives, eventually thrives, this is not the usual memoir with this subject at its core. It’s a map of the path this narrator took, not in sequence, but the way you would hear it if she told it to a friend, or a therapist, in remembered pieces, so you come to the whole almost by surprise, with a little gasp of wow as you see where she ends up.
Very highly recommended.
January 10, 2021
On page 1, Jeannine Ouellette says it herself: "Expectations can be slippery." When I start a new book, I wrestle with mine. Will I want to keep reading or will I have to work to get into the story? Will I connect with the narrator and want to know the ending or feel indifferent? As soon as I started reading The Part That Burns, I understood. This book would exceed my expectations--and I wasn't wrong. It's not a linear narrative but a memoir in fragments. Each essay or chapter is different, interesting, engaging like scattered pieces of a puzzle that the writer--and reader--are trying to put together. It's about a childhood wrought with abuse and rejection. It's about trauma and epigenetics, home and roots. It's about a girl who grows up to become a teenager who becomes a young woman who becomes a wife and a mother and every step of the way, she yearns for what we all yearn for: acceptance and love. Sounds simple, but it's not, especially for Jeannine, and page after page, I needed to know that she would find what she was looking for.
February 11, 2021
This clear-eyed memoir stands face-to-face with childhood trauma, yet transcends the most disturbing episodes to tell the story of survival, growth, acceptance, and notions of the cellular and intergenerational aspects of trauma. Amazingly, this is not a difficult read, but a beautiful direct account, narrated in progressive waves of awareness by a child, a 9th grader, a young woman and newlywed, a daughter, and eventually as a mother. The Part That Burns, "a memoir in fragments", offers vivid images of the houses and yards that marked the passing ages, and of the fiery memories that ignite new responses with each visit.
February 8, 2021
Jeannine's memoir is stunning. Raw, heartfelt, and powerful. The fragmented stories of her painful childhood are woven together beautifully with stories of her own motherhood and transition into adulthood. She is both resilient and emotionally brave. Her ability to be open and truthful about her journey to, what seems to be, her whole real-self is inspiring. With the scars and pain, can come a sense of hope and wholeness. I can't recommend this memoir enough, it is well worth reading and rereading.
April 4, 2021
Jeannine Ouellette’s memoir is beautifully written. She uses essays and vignettes to tell us a difficult story, a story that is dark but also beautiful. This book is a fierce exploration of what it means to love. I am so grateful to the author for offering us her voice, and for her raw, uninhibited details regarding childhood trauma—detailing the ways in which we survive. So many of us need this story of perseverance. The writing is gorgeous and heart wrenching and necessary. You will be better off for having read it.
December 29, 2021
Of the many things to fall in love with in this beautiful memoir, I found myself impressed most with the structure and the way Ouellette captivates, in small fragments, the totality of a life. I also, like many readers, identified with the female body so precisely conveyed here - so gorgeous and so unsafe - and I found hope in her strength and vulnerability. I believe that we start to heal our traumas when we can speak about them - and to speak about them and to have others witness that speaking, well, that's the best gift of all, both for writer and for reader.
January 17, 2021
You want to read this gorgeous, luminous memoir, as heart-breaking as it is redemptive. Told in fragments--like memory--some as clear and cutting as glass while others are as gauzy as dreams. Those told in the child Jeannie's voice have us rooting for her courageous spirit and grit. Others read as poetry, aching and beautiful. My first reading of this book was a compulsive straight-through. My second is slow to savor Ouellette's lyrical prose. Exquisite writing.
February 1, 2021
Jeannine Ouellette's memoir The Part That Burns shines like a prism of light and color. This fragmented/mosaic of stories is like a beautiful heirloom quilt lovingly stitched together reflecting the expert hand of its maker. Each essay, like squares of a beautiful quilt, are delicately woven together. This is a book to hold in your hands, carry in your heart, and absorb into your skin - your bones. The Part That Burns is a work of art to return to in awe and inspiration.
January 4, 2021
The Part That Burns is stunning in its capacity to weave from a collection of "fragments" to a story so whole and quietly profound. While each chapter offers its own glimmering shard, there simultaneously forms a larger, even more brilliant picture of a person emerging from the broken pieces. I am transfixed.
February 1, 2021
There are some books that I can tell from the start are going to be ones that I go back to, books that resonate in a way that's difficult to put into words -- this is one of those books. The language and imagery are stunning, as is the structure; cracked open and put back together again into a beautiful, fractured whole.
April 12, 2021
The Part That Burns is a really special book. It's an intimate, intense, funny, devastating and tremendously well written memoir. I find myself particularly interested in the way Ouellette weaves together ideas of memory, trauma and the body. My favorite sections were Baby Girl, The Part That Burns, and Bent.
January 5, 2021
This book is exquisite. Ouellette gives us the stories of her early years between Minnesota and Wyoming, between homes and schools and family. The writing is stunningly beautiful. You want to read sentences over and over to let them soak in and stay for a good long time.
March 23, 2021
....Ouellette’s story is one of truth and beauty, full of lyrical language and images, and filled with moments of awe and wonder between Ouellette and her children.
Read my full review at https://brevity.wordpress.com/2021/02...
Read my full review at https://brevity.wordpress.com/2021/02...
June 23, 2021
A wonderful, lyrical and tender book. Themes circle back on each other and echo in beautiful ways.
January 28, 2021
Jeannine Ouellette is a brave woman, but I think she might deny that. This is not a long book; in fact, I have the impression that it could have easily been twice the length that it is. "The Part That Burns" hopscotches through time in a loop of snapshots of the author's life and I have the feeling that each story she tells is carefully curated. Her writing is spare and rich at the same time. I appreciate (and even envy...) her ability to write prose that is saturated in poetry without seeming pompous or self-important. It is obvious that these small stories have lived inside of her for years, writing and rewriting themselves, and that it is a great relief to them to finally be on the page.
This is a difficult book to read. Or, I should say, this was a difficult book for *me* to read, but I suspect that will be the case for many readers, especially women. Ms. Ouellette - perhaps intentionally, perhaps unknowingly - has written a shared story, a woman's story. Sexual abuse, the awkwardness of youth, crazy mothers, unsatisfying sex, the loneliness of marriage, the fierce joy of motherhood: to say that the subject matter is relatable is an understatement.
And so yeah, it's tough. Ms. Ouellette courageously dredges up from the muck of time and memory the kind of pain and shame and stale fear that I think most of us would happily leave buried. And still, the writing isn't pitiful or self-indulgent or whiny. It's a brave and self-confronting documentary: These things happened and here I am.
I think I'll probably read it again.
This is a difficult book to read. Or, I should say, this was a difficult book for *me* to read, but I suspect that will be the case for many readers, especially women. Ms. Ouellette - perhaps intentionally, perhaps unknowingly - has written a shared story, a woman's story. Sexual abuse, the awkwardness of youth, crazy mothers, unsatisfying sex, the loneliness of marriage, the fierce joy of motherhood: to say that the subject matter is relatable is an understatement.
And so yeah, it's tough. Ms. Ouellette courageously dredges up from the muck of time and memory the kind of pain and shame and stale fear that I think most of us would happily leave buried. And still, the writing isn't pitiful or self-indulgent or whiny. It's a brave and self-confronting documentary: These things happened and here I am.
I think I'll probably read it again.
January 17, 2022
Only one other time have I reached the end of a book and immediately turned back to page one to read it all over again. The first was with Helen Macdonald’s brilliant “H is for Hawk.” This time, it is Jeannine Ouellette’s exquisite voice in “The Part that Burns” that drew me back. The authenticity of voice is paramount in all writing, but most crucial in memoir where the reader is asked not to suspend belief, but to embrace it. Ouellette alternates between the childhood and adult narratives with the ease of a master weaver. With honesty and grace, she exposes her most vulnerable moments of trauma as a child and her quest to make sense of them as an adult. It’s truly a wonder that any of us survive childhood, much less one so void of allies. Ouellette is alone in her struggle to survive an erratic, mentally unbalanced mother and a sexual predator of a stepfather. But survive she does to become a mother of three, determined right in her own children’s lives what was so wrong in her own. In sharing her journey, she gives us a vision of what is possible in recovering childhood abuse. I loved this book. I love how Ouellette trusts the reader with her most vulnerable part, the part that burns. To be read again and again.
June 18, 2021
Trauma seers into our nervous systems where it smolders only to flare again when we face life’s many triggers.
In her memoir The Part that Burns, Jeannine Ouellette artfully and lyrically captures this experience. Her beautiful story of pain, longing, and love stayed with me long after I put her book down. I was haunted in all the right ways by her characters and her use of structure and metaphor which capture experiences that often defy language.
While her subject matter is challenging, she handles it gracefully, never revealing gratuitous details nor asking too much of the reader. She uses structure to create a powerful container for her experiences, which as a trauma survivor, made me feel both held and deeply understood. I was struck by the level of resilience she captures as well as the fierce love she writes about, given everything that happens to the narrator.
Reading her story was a gift that was both entertaining and instructive. I highly recommend this book.
In her memoir The Part that Burns, Jeannine Ouellette artfully and lyrically captures this experience. Her beautiful story of pain, longing, and love stayed with me long after I put her book down. I was haunted in all the right ways by her characters and her use of structure and metaphor which capture experiences that often defy language.
While her subject matter is challenging, she handles it gracefully, never revealing gratuitous details nor asking too much of the reader. She uses structure to create a powerful container for her experiences, which as a trauma survivor, made me feel both held and deeply understood. I was struck by the level of resilience she captures as well as the fierce love she writes about, given everything that happens to the narrator.
Reading her story was a gift that was both entertaining and instructive. I highly recommend this book.
January 17, 2021
Like the fire lilies that “are coaxed open only by smoke,” this memoir illuminates how extraordinary life – our emotions, our decisions, our memories – can be.
Emerging from this collage of stories feels like waking up from a vivid dream. I felt like I was right alongside the author, experiencing each vignette of her memory…beautiful and so purely human. She activates all the senses – recalling the scent of the air in Wyoming, and later in Cuernavaca; the flavors of different places and times; music that marks the turn of new years – and never leaves the reader wondering how it felt to experience these remarkable and often painful moments of life.
Emerging from this dream state, I am left feeling introspective and wanting, already, to reread this book.
Emerging from this collage of stories feels like waking up from a vivid dream. I felt like I was right alongside the author, experiencing each vignette of her memory…beautiful and so purely human. She activates all the senses – recalling the scent of the air in Wyoming, and later in Cuernavaca; the flavors of different places and times; music that marks the turn of new years – and never leaves the reader wondering how it felt to experience these remarkable and often painful moments of life.
Emerging from this dream state, I am left feeling introspective and wanting, already, to reread this book.
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