3 comments about Lost and Found.

1. Lost and Found is a wonderful guideline for teenage girls and women alike. Israeloff captivates the reader as she opens up and shares her life in this autobiography of her eighth grade year. It is a page turner that has the reader remembering and understanding the "horrors" of eigth grade. It allows the reader to look into her own life and remember her own struggle in finding herself. After reading Lost and Found and looking into her own life, the reader will walk away from this book feeling inspired and full of hope.



2. This book does not claim to be anything more than it is: a woman's exploration and dissection of the diary she kept as an adolescent. However, it is somehow less than even that. I expected there to be passages or at least quotes from her diary, followed by present day commentary. However, there were only a few short excerpts from the diary scattered in random and non-fitting places throughout the book. This made me wonder why the author did not just call it a memoir or autobiography, instead of disguising it as journal entries. Which leads to another central problem, which is who wants to spend the time reading a whole book about someone's middle age crises, or childhood and youth for that matter, unless there is some extrodinary reason?

   Lost and Found is interesting in some parts, but very pompous in others. Isrealoff rambles on about her quite ordinary life and brags about the smallest acheivements, such as receiving good grades on her report card or doing well in gym class. During the parts where she discusses her middle school crushes, the book read like a young romance novel.

   I was excited when I bought this book and am disappointed in it because I think the author had a lot of potential with this project. For instance, by showing statistics about what issues a lot of adolescent girls face and then revealing passages of her old diary that directly related to these, she could have given an up-front perspective on an example of something of big importance to many young girls and their parents. Even by discussing her diary entries more instead of just writing about what she remembered from her school days, Israeloff could have given the reader an in-depth glimpse into the life of a growing girl. However, Lost and Found is only a mediocre memoir about the author's schoolgirl days, and it does not deliver what it promises to in its description, which is a commentary by a woman looking back on her pre-teen life and the issues of self-esteem she faced then, with excerpts from an old diary to back her up.

   This book is easy and at some points interesting reading, but it does not do much for understanding young girls. For something better that relates to understanding and/or raising young girls, I'd recommend See Jane Win. For better first-person accounts of growing up as a girl, read Listen Up: Voices From the Next Feminist Generation. And for better memoir/autobiographical experiences, try anything by David Sedaris.




3. I have to admit, I could have missed something. Maybe if I had kept on reading after 40 pages, I would have found something to make reading this one worthwhile. But after 40 pages, I put it on the pile of books to get rid of.

   I think Israeloff meant well. She was going through something millions of woman go through. She wanted to tell her story and help someone. And maybe she has. But instead of reading through her journal entries like I thought it would, or reading about her struggle to grow up and into the woman she wanted to be, I read something which resembled a young adult novel. I read about her classes, her assignments, her teachers....and I just didn't care at all. What does an assignment in junior high have to do with anything? Maybe I'm missing something...but I doubt it.

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3 comments about Dawn: An Autobiography of Early Youth.

1. "Dawn" may be stronger than Dreiser's fiction, which is saying a good deal. He shows a remarkable memory and attention to detail. I am admittedly biased because I identified so closely with his experiences as a child, youth, and adult, but the scenes in this volume are well drawn and he overcomes his sometimes florid style and difficulties with fluid language well here. Along with "Newspaper Days," one gets an intimate look at the life of this talented and important author.



2. Although he published this volume (second after Newspaper Days, chronologically), Dreiser intended Dawn to be the first of four autobiographies, each covering approximately 20 years of his life. This confirms Dreiser's ambition, but doesn't place this book in the prize category of great autobiographical works. For all of his professed candor, Dreiser still skirts personal truths for the protocol, and his sentences wind and ramble and repeat like an electric train on contorted tracks.
   If you liked Sister Carrie and some of his other longer fictions, this extra reading may be helpful, but if you want to go for the "red meat" of Dreiser's life, I'd encourage a reading of his American Notebooks--his journals, published after his death and never really intended for publication. In them, boy oh boy, does the real Dreiser sans facade emerge.



3. Dreiser follows such a simple structure. First, the dreamy, hypnotic recurrent images of early childhood, that only melted into perspective years later. Second, the glory of sexual awakening, mixed with the whitewater current of ambition, shuffling like white noise into his consciousness only once he tunes his ears to listen.
   To the details. Dreiser loved his mother, in a way that may have swung past the platonic, and certainly shaped his female ideal. She does seem an ideal parent, with her selfless love, endless devotion in hard work, and support regardless of the wayward tendencies of her iconoclastic brood. His father seems little more than a hollowed out Jesus enthusiast, who, following the personal disaster that surely damaged his brain, emptily follows Christ's lead by punishing his children for not being religious enough.
   Dreiser himself came of age by losing it to the immigrant bakery owner's daughter, an idle miscreant long forgotten outside these pages. Dreiser was bound by two diametrically opposed desires - one for sex, the other for love, and as a wise man once said, these rarely overlap, especially for Dreiser in his early youth. His platonic ideal is the shy, frumpy type, while he can't help but be lured in by the pretty ones. His sex complex keeps him from many a lay, which he overcomes by ravishing a young Italian waywardess.
   Poe once said something like "Any man who chooses to tell about his life the way it really is will change the world forever, but no one has the courage to do it." Dreiser comes close, though I doubt this has stood much ground the test of time. I was referred to it by one of Fitzgerald's early characters. Dreiser doesn't hesitate to wag his finger at himself, and never, ever makes me wish not to have had the golden opportunity to join him for lunch of a foggy Tuesday.

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