"I did what I always did when something seismic happened that I couldn't deal with. I concentrated on the superficial." That's a quote from the book...but it can also serve as a thesis sentence. Cooper seems completely unaware that the banal details of her privileged life are uninteresting.
I didn't find her anecdote of "getting away with" singing rewritten words to Blessed Assurance during church congregational singing entertaining. I didn't care that her mother made her buy a book for her first boyfriend rather than the cologne she wanted to give him. If she could've painted her childish cluelessness as a thing of the past, something that stands in stark contrast to what the rest of the country was going through when she now looks back on it, that would've been much better. Instead, she seems, still, to find her isolated life the most interesting thing about Liberia in the '70s. The bigger story of revolution and bloodshed is related in boring historical fact lists.
I've heard Cooper interviewed and she said she researched the heck out of it... well anyone could've done that. The reason we look to memoirs is so that we get a "this is how those facts felt" view. Cooper doesn't seem to have felt much of anything during that time past crushes on boys and affection for her favorite linen shirt.
D
Non-fiction #1
