Mann’s introduction to her husband of 40 years, Larry Mann, is equally topical. Hold Still is filled with these sorts of maddening lacunae.
Memoir is nothing if not the accretion of this sort of detail: where and what one studies, degrees earned-or not. This is the first readers hear of Mann’s interest in Pound or the Master’s Degree. As Twombly begins a story about Italy and Ezra Pound, Mann writes: “I mentioned my past fascination with Ezra Pound… and about whom I’d written my master’s thesis.” One evening, “a group of us” are gathered at the Mann home with Twombly and his partner Nicola. The other passion, writing, gets less space than photography: a master’s thesis on Pound merits a single throwaway sentence. Mann writes: “Maybe I didn’t know it at the time, but I had found the twin artistic passions that were to consume my life.” The discovery of photography is barely touched on. Mann continued her rebellious ways at Putney, breaking curfew, writing a great deal of sophomoric poetry, getting busted for shoplifting. When her parents sent her to Vermont’s exclusive Putney School, Mann found the transition wrenching: “I was suddenly living in another country where my currency was worthless.” She grew into a rebellious, horse-loving teenager. Mann’s mother-in-law shot her husband, then turned the gun on herself.ĭescribing herself as a “feral” child, Mann so hated clothing that she went without until age five. Her doctor father channeled his stifled artistic impulse into a bizarre obsession with death, while her propriety-prizing mother once yanked an inebriated Carson McCullers from a bathtub. Mann was born in historic Lexington, Virginia to seemingly mismatched parents. The reader is left wondering why Hold Still is called a memoir at all. In chapter after chapter- Hold Still clocks in at 482 pages-Mann unfolds the dark secrets of her father, her mother, her adulterous great-grandmother. Fellow artist, friend and neighbor Cy Twombly is also afforded many pages.īut rarely do these often painful revelations return to Mann herself. She writes probingly of these people and of Virginia Carter, or GeeGee, the woman who raised her. Readers learn of great-grandparents, grandparents, even Mann’s crazy in-laws.
Abjuring the memoir’s traditional structure of a life cycle, Mann instead opts for an idiosyncratic course delving deeply into the lives of her ancestors. Never have I read a memoir-or a book purporting to be one-revealing so little of its author. With the above caveats in mind, let me say my disappointment stems from Hold Still’s impersonality. This reviewer has no interest in adding to Mann’s pain. Hold Still makes it clear the experience still rankles. Atop this, Mann was roundly criticized by reviewers, critics, journalists, and an incensed public over 1992’s Immediate Family, an exhibit featuring nude photographs of her children, then aged 12, 10, and 7. When a book’s author is an accomplished artist, double that effort. Negative book reviews are the most difficult to write. As a longtime admirer of Sally Mann’s gorgeous, often controversial photography, I eagerly began her memoir, Hold Still, reading with increasing bewilderment, until I finished feeling I knew Mann no more than when I began.
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