You see these phrases everywhere in Ordinary Light, sometimes five or 10 per page: "I was grounded in a steadfast, sturdy certainty," "the blurry outside," "out here," "the presence of a thing called Home," "the strange zero-gravity hover of being in-between places," "I had stepped irreversibly into a strange and fearsome dominion."

Superficially, Tracy K. Smith’s book is as straightforward as memoirs come: Girl is born. Girl has childhood. Girl ages; she makes friends and loses them. She goes to school. She fears God and is wary of sex (and those roles reverse after a while). Her mom survives cancer but later dies of it. Girl becomes a poet. She’ll win the Pulitzer Prize. The chapters progress through time. But the animating logic is physical.

From her hometown in California to Yale and then back, Smith is and somehow always has been looking for borders: between self and other, between home and outside; feeling "grounded" in a "pocket of security" or otherwise "unmoored." She is always coming up against ideas, in physical confrontation with thoughts and places or contending with their weight. Eventually, inevitably, these borders become less certain: The outside offers new kinds of belonging; new pockets form in unexpected places. Pain and danger grow where safety was once surest, in homes and even bodies. We strive to be in the world but not of it. This proves impossible.

In the book's strongest places, I found myself in conspiracy with Smith, searching for the secure and the perilous in home and school and faith and politics. I found it weakest, as Smith might say, when I came up against the hard limits of what I was willing to believe.

Memoirists have broad license, even with the facts of their own biography, but in Ordinary Light Smith at least implies strict fidelity: She sometimes cuts scenes short, for example, because she doesn't remember the particulars of a conversation or event and is not willing to invent these details. But throughout Ordinary Light she engages in a different kind of suspicious revision: reporting certain weighty, symbolic modes of thought about her younger self as her thoughts at the time. As a young child, she understands the weight of duty on her father’s shoulders. Of seventh grade, she recalls "scanning the crowd," trying "to gather a sense of what everyone was becoming and where the children we’d so recently been had gone." That’s heavy for a 12-year-old.

Perhaps those inventions are necessary. Memoirs have had a tough couple of decades; commercially they are more viable than ever, but the critical and literary communities have become suspicious. Memoirs are solipsistic, narcissistic, myopic — in 2011, Neil Genzlinger begged "a moment of silence" for "the lost art of shutting up." Late last year Jonathan Yardley diagnosed memoir as an MFA-borne illness, "writing-school" books, filled "with all the self-absorption those places encourage."

So perhaps 10-year-old Tracy must, even in memory, interpret the world the way an adult poet would. The bulk of Ordinary Light occurs during Smith’s childhood, and while adult Smith’s stature and accomplishments might make her story worthy of enough interest to evade the cheapest accusations of narcissism, the experience of being young does not frequently escape navel-gazing. Ordinary Light is history, but it is a book and artwork first. It is something that must be held together by motifs sustained across hundreds of pages, something its author hopes will be worthy and interesting.

It is.

— Emmett Rensin

Image credit: Knopf