Dogfish Memory

Reviews / Votes

"This narrative thread is way too broken to craft into the kind of story you might tell a friend. This is a narrative that attracts only readers. I have never seen a better illustration of how, spider-like and blind, we weave our lives, one tier to the next. I have never seen a memoir so aggressively honest. He wanted to create something true out of these bits of failure (and some glorious moments) and he has done that." -- Susan Salter Reynolds - Los Angeles Times "...[A] poignant, wistful and complex book...in the end, a deeply moving book. And it also made me want to see Maine." -- Chris Bohjalian - Washington Post Book World "A sly and graceful memoir about Maine, sailing, and self." -- The Maine Magazine "In this meditative, unconventional memoir...many of the sections have a subtle intensity that elevates them to prose poems while the focus on sailing always anchors them. In discarding chronology, Dane is able to present life as we remember it. As he notes in one particularly cogent insight: "Imagined adventures...lead from known to known. Real adventure, by contrast, begins at a single point in the fog and ends at one."" -- Publishers Weekly "An exquisite memoir about lost love and the sustaining grace of the sea." -- T.C. Boyle, author of When the Killing's Done and many other novels "This book by Joseph Dane is what memoir should be. It is open, free, smart, and contemplative (without being philosophical). It is about sailing, yes, but it is also about time, about several places and one place, about the nature of metaphor and the limits of it. This is a superb work. (I would sail with this Dane fellow, but I would not let him choose a girlfriend for me." -- Percival Everett, author of Erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier "A beautifully written account of sailing, and love, and geography, and memory-told in prose as clear and open as water itself." -- Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake "Dogfish Memory combines memoir, elegy, quest narrative, sailing chronicle, and love story, and is held together by a remarkable voice-taut, frequently sardonic, precise, and utterly merciless towards all pretensions, all comforting illusions. It is a beautiful and moving book, propelled and obstructed by its emotional intensity, on the one hand, and its unrelenting, self-deflating intelligence on the other. I found myself thinking of W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn: not in its subject matter, but in its compelling inconsolability. But real books by real writers are sui generis, and this is a real book by a real writer." -- Franklin Burroughs, author of Billy Watson's Croker Sack