GLR January-February 2023

that not all writers speak to all people, which is one of the things that makes great literature great: not its universality but its particularity. Among other examples from the bibliomem oir genre, Rebecca Mead finds the distinct stages of her own life thrown into relief by rereading George Eliot in My Life in Middlemarch, while Katharine Smyth is able to process deeply personal grief in All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf . And perhaps Shakespeare especially has something to tell us about how we fashion ourselves through encounters with literature. After all, he is the writer who fa mously remarks “All the world’s a stage” in As You Like It , and, in Macbeth , “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,/ That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/ And then is heard no more.” Like the books that have inspired this new generation of memoirists, not every bibliomemoir will be a perfect fit for every reader. Those looking for more overt discussions of sex might lean toward Mark Doty’s What Is the Grass: Walt Whit man in My Life, which takes off from the Whitman’s admiration of brotherly love to discuss what he finds erotic. Or those look ing for more “memoir” and less “biblio” might try Daniel Mendelsohn’s An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic , where the author describes his relationship with his aging father in light of the ancient poem. But those looking for a gay man’s ac count of coming of age (and aging) while pondering some of the most resonant moments in Shakespeare—as presented by a leading Renaissance scholar—will find much to love in Read ing Shakespeare Reading Me.

Shakespeare” in The Merchant of Venice. The very opening line has the merchant Antonio announce to his friends, “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.” Antonio’s friend asks what makes him so mournful: his business affairs? No, Antonio says. Then another friend suggests: “Why, then you are in love.” Antonio denies this, too, but this conversation is interrupted by his beloved friend Bassanio. The younger man arrives and, in inti mate conversation, says: “To you, Antonio, / I owe the most, in money and in love.” For Barkan, this interaction provides an opportunity to discuss not only the many instances of professed love between people of the same gender in Shakespeare, but also Barkan’s own silence about his feelings when closeted. We learn that it took an older, much more openly gay friend to model for Barkan how to be honest about his own gayness and

how to break his public silence about love, a silence that both Barkan andAntonio maintained. Here, as in the rest of the book, the memoir moves seamlessly between the discussion of liter ary characters and of personal identity. In turn, it reminds us that we learn about ourselves both by encountering characters who mirror us and by confronting those we might be different from in crucial ways. Barkan’s book joins the growing genre of “bibliomemoir,” where authors explore their own lives through the lens of books they have loved. Such memoirs can be a real delight when they reveal the ways in which we figure out who we are by reading about the experiences of others, or learn about our selves from writers who speak to us. Part of this is realizing Mary Evans. Act I, Scene 1. Antonio & Bassanio . Picture Library.

January–February 2023

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