The Memoir Man

The small dramas that happen in public places are like mini stories that can entertain, make us think, or touch a certain emotion. They are played out without a producer or editor, but maybe with a writer taking notes. These twenty or so stories are perhaps those notes.

The Memoir Man: and Others in Public Places is a collection of both short stories and poems that range from a camouflaged homeless person pushing a grocery cart carrying a typewriter, to a man walking on Fifth Avenue with a television on his head. The main characters are either slightly mentally or emotionally challenged, and happen to be out in public.

Bits and pieces of lives such as these are played out, with an involved narrator or without.

A man sits at a table in a library peeling an egg while being watched by a woman quietly and obsessively reviewing highlights of her ancestor’s life.

A man on a train is peeling an egg and wondering what to do with the tiny pieces of shells lodged in the creases of his hands.

A woman watches and judges a woman filling her pockets with napkins at a Barnes and Noble café.

In a museum lobby, a woman notices a couple trying to check their baby along with their coats.

Both long and short stories capture obsession, loneliness, nosiness, and brief moments of guilt or compassion.

He’s back. He looks at the kid holding his pen. He looks pained. He walks to the window. He can’t sit down. He rubs his eyes and pushes his gray hair to a stick-out straight-up position. Then smooths it down. Rubs his head again. I think: Maybe he has a publisher. Maybe he is a retired professor on a mission for the Center for Advanced Learning or the Fellowship of Spanish Believers or the Salvation Army … Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital in the British Museum. The man could be another Karl Marx and I am watching him change the course of history. It’s a shame they don’t supply him with an office. I think too: If that kid speaks to him, he will cry.

(About the Author)

Frances Webb has been writing for over sixty years while raising a family and teaching. This is her fifth book. The first three are novels, while the fourth and fifth are collections of short stories, many of which have been published in literary journals.

The author grew up in a small town in New Jersey, and has lived and worked in Pennsylvania and New York. She is now retired and lives in a retirement community close to family.