A Family History
by Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2021
176 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, a lyrical meditation on family, place, and inheritance.
Names for Light traverses time and memory to weigh three generations of a family's history against a painful inheritance of postcolonial violence and racism. In spare, lyric paragraphs framed by white space, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint explores home, belonging, and identity by revisiting the cities in which her parents and grandparents lived. As she makes inquiries into their stories, she intertwines oral narratives with the official and mythic histories of Myanmar. But while her family's stories move into the present, her own story―that of a writer seeking to understand who she is―moves into the past, until both converge at the end of the book.
Born in Myanmar and raised in Bangkok and San Jose, Myint finds that she does not have typical memories of arriving in the United States; instead, she is haunted by what she cannot remember. By the silences lingering around what is spoken. By a chain of deaths in her family line, especially that of her older brother as a child. For Myint, absence is felt as strongly as presence. And, as she comes to understand, naming those absences, finding words for the unsaid, means discovering how those who have come before have shaped her life. Names for Light is a moving chronicle of the passage of time, of the long shadow of colonialism, and of a writer coming into her own as she reckons with her family's legacy.
"On a line-by-line level, the book is spectacularly lyrical, and each word feels perfectly chosen. Some readers may struggle with the chronology and unnamed characters, but the text is undeniably powerful. An imaginative and compelling memoir about what we inherit and what we pass on." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"In this hypnotic memoir, Burmese-American novelist Myint looks to myth and folklore to explore her family's legacy...While her poetic narration is indisputably alluring, the nonlinear story line can sometimes become taxing. For those willing to put in the work, this serpentine narrative is a thing of beauty." - Publishers Weekly
"Myint's geographies and her syntax will echo inside you like luminous ghosts: opulent and ruthless and profound, like drowned sapphires waiting to be reunited with the wind." - Lily Hoang
"Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is driving an important autobiographical rickshaw into the twenty-first century." - Vi Khi Nao
"Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is one of the most remarkable writers of our time, and Names for Light is a piercing and heartbreaking revelation." - Janice Lee, author of Damnation and The Sky Isn't Blue
This information about Names for Light was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is the author of The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven. She has a BA from Brown University, an MFA from the University of Notre Dame, and a PhD from the University of Denver. She teaches at Amherst College.
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