cover image Cures for Hunger: A Memoir

Cures for Hunger: A Memoir

Deni Y. B%C3%A9chard. Milkweed (PGW, dist.), $24 (338p) ISBN 978-1-57131-331-7

In the opening pages of B%C3%A9chard's memoir, we learn that his duplicitous, bank-robbing father, Andr%C3%A9%E2%80%94to whom the bulk of the book is devoted%E2%80%94committed suicide "in a house empty but for a single chair%E2%80%A6on the outskirts of Vancouver." Begun just three months after his father's death, B%C3%A9chard's story is the result of "seventeen years of rewriting," and the process shows in the prose, which vacillates between that of a pretentious, if talented, young writer, and an adult whose understanding of his troubled youth has been refined by years of reflection and searching. Nevertheless, B%C3%A9chard powerfully evokes the ever-present tension between the author and his parents ("Our family always seemed on the verge of disaster, and then the danger passed, and very little changed."), as well as his own struggle to emulate and escape his father. At once a quest to uncover the details of Andr%C3%A9's life%E2%80%94including his real name (Edwin), the town in Quebec from whence he came and the family he left there, and a criminal record that led one of Andr%C3%A9's sisters to remark, "%E2%80%98Il ne faisait rien %C3%A0 moiti%C3%A9.'%E2%80%94He didn't do anything halfway."%E2%80%94B%C3%A9chard's story is also one of personal discovery, and a teasing out of the function of memory: what it keeps, what it loses, and what it saves. (May)