Believe me, I am undoubtedly sure of at least one characteristic of a memoir now. Either you end up relating to the author's feelings, or he takes every piece of you and perforates it until you can begin to even understand how the author is dealing with a situation. Memoirs are so specific and detailed that this is how you feel when you are reading one. It reaches you.
The Burn Journals is not the type of memoir that has eternal sentences full of beautiful words and perfect figures of speech. It also doesn't seem like Brent Runyon has the broadest vocabulary in the world, but this won't matter throughout the whole book. It took only two pages for me to recognize that I was trapped in the author's thoughts. This is an extremely direct and frivolous memoir that without the use of spectacular writing stands for itself.
That is how I felt through the first 36 pages of The Burn Journals. I was hooked to the feeling of rage and irrevocable physical pain Brent made himself go through. The way he had so much anger and/or sadness coming out of a place he didn't know where, amused me. Because of those repressions, he for a minute thought he didn't have anything to lose. The thing is, we believe we have done all the thinking there is to do before taking an action, but it is not afterwards that we realize how many things we skipped and could have thought that could change our opinion. That is the time where the actual, real thoughts, come to us. These are our instincts.
Runyon talks about his handshake with death in a senseless way. First of all, it could clearly avoid too much digressing. But mostly it is because there is no need for an extremely detailed sentence when "I'm going to set myself on fire" (16) is enough to astound us. And we are left with nothing else, but a bunch of pages that will send the same message.
I really do hope Maggie gets better, too.
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