Looking for Polaris: A Memoir of Losing and Finding by Dawn Laurente Marfil

The first thing that will strike one about this book is how funny it is. And the second thing is how unfunny it actually is.
Many years ago, Walter Kerr wrote that comedy is actually more tragic than tragedy. The best comedy is always harsh. “To be funny is to have been where agony was... The comic hero’s reaction to the threatening universe is a decision to circumvent it.”
We see this playing out in Marfil’s narratives, which are all about loss. The greatest loss of all is the loss of the father. But that story is not part of the book. In its place we have tales of other losses. For all the pain that underlies the laughter, this is not a dark book. Not just because of the laughter—sly, hilarious, ironic—but because the author hopes, with Cathy Caruth, that: “With every reprise of the First Loss... each step back is equal to three steps forward until one just learns to keep walking forward."
This is a brave, new voice in our literature, and one I celebrate!
- Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo
As Lorrie Moore succinctly puts it, “writing is both the excursion into and the excursion out of one’s life.” "Looking for Polaris," Dawn Laurente Marfil’s debut collection of autobiographical narratives, is remarkable for the way it oscillates almost breathlessly between the confessional and the commentary, with metaphor serving as the fragile and scintillant bridge between these experiential realms, whose common ground is memory—here at once invigorated and disabused by the transfigurings of an exuberant, humorous, and reflexive imagination. In essay after essay, we are presented memoir pieces that appear unforgiving in their candor and hyperbole, and yet their deeper truth is always already implicit in the desirous investment of the verbal gesture itself: the interest—and the clemency—that art extends, again and again, towards life.
- J. Neil C. Garcia