Fleda Brown - Book Launch Party - Driving With Dvorak

All our lives are made of moments, both simple and sublime, all of which in some way partake of the cultural moment. Fleda Brown is that rare writer who, in narrating the incidents and observations of her life, turns her story, by wit and insight and a poet's gift, into something more. This is an unconventional memoir. A series of lyrical essays about life in a maddeningly complex family during the even more maddeningly complex fifties and sixties, it adds up to one woman's story while simultaneously reflecting the story of her times. A strange and erratic father, a resigned and helpless mother, a mentally disabled brother, a sister with a brain tumor: folded into Brown's reflections are the intimacies and ambivalences of family and marriage, girlhood and adolescence, identity and self-knowledge. Whether reflecting on the automobile industry or a wrenching parting from beloved pets or the process of aging, Brown's telling rings with great humor, profound perception, and a lyricism that makes even the most commonplace moment uncommonly good reading.

"Throughout this stunning book of essays, we journey into memory through a music made of accumulation. Fleda Browns voice is edgy, direct, yet surprisingly tender. A decrepit summer cottage, a brain-damaged brother, even an exhaustingly difficult father are all part of the symphony she offers her lucky readers." Rebecca McClanahan, author of The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings

Obviously, this collection of poems is organized around the impact and influence of Elvis Presley. Each poem recounts biographical, musical, and cultural images of the phenomenon that was Elvis and sets them within snippets of the time period in which he lived. So along with the familiar details of Elvis and Priscilla, Elvis and his mother, Elvis and the Army, are references to Teflon, transistor radios, Ed Sullivan, Sputnik
, the pill, Nixon, and the death of Princess Di. None of this follows a strict chronological ordering, but it begins with Elvis in the Sun Records studio and loosely follows through the details of his life from observers' perspectives. Featured prominently as the last section of the book is a tour of Graceland through the thoughts of fans as they tour the "Living Room," "Elvis's Bedroom," "Lisa Marie's Favorite Chair," "The Jungle Room," and "The Meditation Garden.

These are not poems about those rooms in Graceland or about Elvis's life as much as they are poems about the icon of Elvis Presley: voices recounting how Elvis was a part of their own lives whether through his music, his TV image or his physical presence. "Ho hum, I thought the songs / were for me" says one persona looking over the famed Trophy Room. The poems raise the issue of what popular culture says about what we value while they recount the images of a man rather than the man himself.