The Summer of Ordinary Ways

The Summer of Ordinary Ways
by Nicole Helget

The Summer of Ordinary Ways combines succinct prose with lyrical, poetic sections. This contrast in prose styles illuminates the barrier between the fairly ordinary details of life in rural Minnesota and the intense family interactions. The sections where Helget switches to second person point of view are that much more haunting because of the immediacy of the prose and lack of remove offered to the reader.

Helget taps into relationships, what really sets people apart in life and what really matters. Immense attention to relationships seems to be one of the major components of all the great memoirs I’ve read. For all that The Summer of Ordinary Ways is brief, the relationships explored are very complex and indicative of a longer work. I attribute this feeling to Helget’s control over her details. Everything she chooses to incorporate into her memoir seems to have a place and is explored in the right amount of detail. The Acknowledgements section at the back makes these relationships seem even more real, though I think the statements to individual family members could be interpreted by some readers as undercutting the relationships she was trying to portray in the memoir.

The chronology was somewhat difficult to get used to. Her narrative jumped around a bit more than I’m used to, especially in the Summer of Ordinary Ways chapter. Interrupting narrative is a good way to break and rebuild tension, but at times, I had to go back and clarify if she was recounting memories from the 1980’s, describing the present, or giving an account of the not so distant past. Her short sections of interweaved vignettes reminded me to some extent of Joan Didion’s style. I see the merit in interlacing two stories with very different overtones to build thematic development, like in the chapter Stain You Red. The contrast of Colie learning how to play baseball from an overbearing father and the pitch-forking incident informs both stories. The interlacing of stories also assists in character development. Without Helget’s portrayal of her father from the perspective of frustrated major league baseball player stuck in rural Minnesota, the audience would have disliked him, and found him un-relatable as a character, after the animal cruelty to Big Jenny. The baseball sections, the longing for failed and unrealized dreams, bring out his humanity and make him tolerable as a character.