Chistoper Buckley's adverbs of memoir

Image: Christopher Buckley with his parents from New York Times

Today's post is not on CanLit. Though I'm currently working on a novel, I keep getting nudged by the memoir that has been quietly simmering away on the back burner. I've been reading some memoirs by other people, to see how they handle them.

Losing Mum and Pup is a  memoir by Christoper Buckley, who lost his mother and father the same year. Not your average parents, mind. They were conservative pundit William F. Buckley Jr. and his socialite wife Pat Turner Buckley. William F. chummed with famous American conservatives, hosted the TV show Firing Line and wrote gargantuan amounts of material: columns, articles, books of fiction and non-fiction.

His only son "Christo" definitely inherited the writing gene. The memoir is a frank, warm and at times hilarious portrayal of his parents. His mother was raised in Vancouver and attended Crofton House, a private girls' school in West Point Grey. She later applied to Vassar, her son reports, because she wasn't great at Math, and there it wasn't an entrance requirement. In Poughkeepsie, Pat roomed with William F. Buckley's sister, who introduced them.

Besides the frankness and humour of this book, I love Buckley's fearless use of adverbs. Recently there have been attempts to quell the use of these modifiers. Some say dropping adverbs is de rigeur in modern American writing, calling them too Victorian.

Sure, Anne Perry uses adverbs, but she's British and her novels are Victorian. Now that I have a contemporary American example, I feel vindicated. On page 134, Buckley's use of adverbs is liberatingly liberal; in fact, I discovered no fewer than six, all of them muscular. The rest of the book is far from devoid of them.

I respectfully take off my hat to Christoper Buckley, and as a fellow-orphan, I sympathize. I know the feeling of being at the front of the mortality line. It comes to us all, unless the order goes terribly wrong in that universal human queue.

Nicely done, Christo. Glad you supported Obama, too.