The Art of Becoming a Citizen: A Memoir

National Book Award–nominated novelist and memoirist Godwin (Getting To Know Death) has always marched to her own drummer, and nowhere more so than in this joining of old history and new concerns. The “old” is 1965–66: her abrupt marriage (they’d known each other six weeks), her subsequent breakup with her second husband, and her move to the Iowa Writers Workshop, where Kurt Vonnegut mentored her. The “new” is Trump’s second presidential campaign in 2024, as she wondered how so many could prefer an inveterate liar and convicted felon to any more morally presentable candidate. In both periods, she’d anticipated a productive future, but both times she’d been proved wrong. How shall she live in her present times? At age 83, she wonders what she still wants to become. Jumbling these disparate experiences together is unorthodox, but in her hands, it works. It’s how the mind often works: past and present set off odd echoes between them. The memoir ends with Trump elected. An old friend sends a consolatory email, but it neither consoles nor points to a brighter future.