A Vexing Memoir of Inner, Outer Children

Until recently, readers in search of the more personal, subjective aspects of human experience turned to fiction. Family conflicts, the trials and errors of education, the rocky road to true love, the quest for identity and one’s role in the scheme of things--these are some of the themes of novels from “Jane Eyre” and “The Magic Mountain” to “Sons and Lovers,” “Their Eyes Were Watching God” and “The Catcher in the Rye.”

Over the last few decades, however, there has been a veritable explosion of first-person nonfiction narratives, from Mary McCarthy’s “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood” and Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” to Richard Rodriguez’s “Hunger of Memory”: authors speaking in their own voices of their own lives.

At first glance, the nonfiction memoir, presumably not aspiring to the higher realm of literature, would seem to demand less in the way of craft. But just as a good novelist shapes her material, finding its inner form, probing her characters, honing her prose to a gleaming precision, so, too, must the writer of the nonfiction memoir. Or why would anyone other than family and friends want to read it? For, unless one has led an unusually newsworthy life (and even then, inept storytelling can make the most exciting life dull to read about), the success of a memoir depends less on its content than on one’s ability to transform that raw material into something more than mere ramblings.

In “Raising Raul: Adventures Raising Myself and My Son,” Maria Hinojosa, a broadcast journalist, tackles what might have been a very appealing subject. A bright, ambitious young woman, born in Mexico, raised in Chicago, pursuing a career, happily married to a promising artist, Hinojosa decided the time had come to have a baby. It’s a story with which many readers can identify. Moreover, this mother-in-the-making not only copes with the demands of family and career, but also seeks to come to terms with her cultural identity.

Unfortunately, the book is an undisciplined mishmash. Frenetic, unconsidered and sometimes ungrammatical, at its best it resembles a one-sided telephone conversation with a garrulous, self-involved friend who assumes you will find every detail of her life as fascinating as she does. To some extent, this is engaging, but it soon palls. Baby Raul is not even born until nearly halfway through the book. Only then does the story become genuinely compelling, when Hinojosa describes her experiences as a new mother--from her problems in breast-feeding (how, she wonders, can something so “natural” prove so difficult?) to her anxieties about leaving the baby to go to work.

The early chapters recount the difficulties of conception and her own endless ruminations on how to ensure the child will understand the importance of his Mexican identity. The contrast she continually draws between her warm, spontaneous Mexican self and her hyper-efficient, organized “gringa” self is heavy-handed and lacking in any real insight, perhaps because the terms of discussion are assumed rather than explored.

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Indeed, what Hinojosa has given us, perhaps inadvertently, is a portrait of the writer as a control-freak. In one rather revelatory scene, the new mom is determined to take her son to a Mexican religious festival. The baby is cranky, but “I didn’t care. I had settled in my mind that I wanted Raul Ariel to celebrate la Virgen no matter what.” So she dragged the not-yet-2-year-old to church, where, mirabile dictu, he does seem to enjoy himself. But before the proceedings are over, she rushes off to exercise class. Through all this and much more, however, Hinojosa has the support of her husband. Not every writer can manage to provide a convincing portrait of an admirable spouse, but Hinojosa does a fine job of conveying her husband’s strength of character.