Raised by Ferns
A Memoir
Maya Jewell Zeller’s poetic memoir-in-essays addresses issues of privilege, poverty, immigration, cultural literacy, and the power of nature.
The book centers Zeller’s life in the Pacific Northwest. “The Privilege Button” compares the comfortable home that she and her husband owned near Spokane to the circumstances of her “itinerant” childhood, when her father struggled with his businesses and her family lived in tenuous places including a gas station, barn, and car. With dry wit, Zeller mocks her mispronunciation of items on a menu as one measure of her “low elite-culture literacy.” “Complete the Sentence” considers the cultural knowledge necessary to answer basic questions on a college entrance exam.
Earthy images of nature abound, as with passages about mossy, fern-covered hills that include depictions of the weeds and berries that Zeller’s family gathered from fields for dinner. An essay on Zeller’s crumbling marriage features musings on a river mysteriously filled with dead deer. The “dormant sticks” that blossom in spring are reminders that “you can hold the past inside yourself like a little doll.”
Thought-provoking observations about the process of crafting a memoir abound. The book is critical of “poverty porn”; memoirs like Hillbilly Elegy, it says, portray rural America as “piles of junked cars or the aftereffects of generations of societal neglect.” Zeller has no interest in positioning herself as a transcendent hero, as a “Kid from a House with No Plumbing [Who] Becomes Tenured Academic.” The book implies that there is danger and hurt in “anyone’s life”; Zeller’s writing students are encouraged to “mesh different things together,” to invent something “revelatory.”
Raised by Ferns is an ingenious memoir-in-essays that recalls a lifetime of determination.
Reviewed by
Kristen Rabe
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
