Memoirous

I watched via YouTube a behind-the-scenes of the movie Nomadland (see my review, https://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/2021/02 /nomadland-review.html). Readers of this blog, both of you, are aware that I like to explore the fuzzy edges of meta fiction. Nomadland is a perfect example of this genre. https://youtu.be/a6g-PA78yd8   Ahh-ha, of course, Fran and Fern, just a casual rearrangement of a name. In this short clip Frances McDormand pointed out instances where she blended real-life details with her character. Such as when she is explaining to Linda May the significance of her plates, the pattern Autumn Leaf, This is all real stuff—which is why the movie resonates so much with all of us, even if we don’t live in a van. We realize we are one degree away from slipping sideways. Fern/Fran describes how her father gifted her with the tableware, collecting them randomly at yard sales. It references a hard-scrabble background, yet one filled with love and attention. There were pe...

Nomadland Director, Chloé Zhao For viewers of a certain age, this film will scare the bejezus out of you. Nomadland highlights the tenuous thread keeping older Americans from completely unraveling. Starting with the Great Recession of 2009 up to today when many of those same people decided to storm the American capital, there is a segment of society that feels forgotten and marginalized. Unheard. Desperate. The character of focus in the film, Fern, is laid off from her job in a gypsum sheetrock factory in Empire, Nevada, a place she remembers as being on the fringe of the desert, where her house looked out onto . . . nothing. Desert. She loved it. And, she loved her husband. She is grieving so much. A facet of most everyone on her same journey, a slew of losses that they are trying to reconcile or run from. Fern decides, or else fate has decided for her, to convert an econo-van into a tiny house and sets out to make a living as an itinerate worker. She works the seasonal shift at...