Review: Rich's 'Ghost Light' earns SRO applause

"Ghost Light"
By Frank Rich
Random House
Memoir
315 pages

In this story: Memoir of enjoyment Theatrical experience RELATED SITES

By Joshua Kuritzky
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- As bestseller lists and insider publications suggest, the memoir "craze" that began with the success of Frank McCourt and Mary Karr is over. Remainder bins are brimming with memoirs that have fallen off the overflowing and overloaded bandwagon. Amidst all the tales of depression and addiction, incest and anorexia, it has become difficult to remember why, before all the hype and word of mouth, we read memoirs in the first place.

We forget that a memoir need not have a "hook" or provide any vital lessons or morals. All it has to do, by being well-told and well-conceived, is serve as its own lesson. It's written proof that living is a shared experience, one where the particulars may be unique but the whole -- the rites, rituals, experiences, and emotions -- is something common and universal.

	EXCERPT
Excerpt: 'Ghost Light'

All of this comes to mind when reading Frank Rich's charming "Ghost Light." A subtle tale of growing up in the '50s and '60s, it is a perfect remedy for the memoir hangover.

Rich's story contains the necessary elements for good memoir: struggle, in his dealing with his parents' divorce and his abusive stepfather; and solace, in his love for the theater. But there is something else, a special flavoring known by McCourt and Karr but so few of their imitators. Difficult to describe, it is unmistakable when tasted; it presents someone else's experiences as something close to your own, and convinces you that had you been born to a so-called "broken" home of a Jewish family outside of Washington, D.C., this is how it would have felt.

Given that Rich is a former theater critic for The New York Times, it is not surprising that his memoir is primarily about theater. But this is not what you think. This is not a tale of redemption through art or a struggle to "make it"; in fact, "Ghost Light" ends long before Rich begins his career. It's a memoir of enjoyment, of growing up -- not growing up as someone or something, but just growing up.

Frank Rich writes a deceptively simple memoir about growing up in the 1950s and '60s in the charming "Ghost Light"

Rich falls in love with the theater, and especially musicals, with a dream not of being on-stage, but of being in the audience, of being someone "always on tap, night and day, weekdays and weekends, to laugh, to applaud, to love."

Just as some people find that certain songs bring certain memories with them, all the major events in "Ghost Light" are marked by trips to the theater in such a way that the trips themselves become the events. With the help of his mother and stepfather (who, when not yelling and beating Rich, enjoys the theater as much as his stepson), Rich is provided with as many theater experiences as one can pack into a young life.

In addition to regular trips to the National theater in Washington and special weekend trips to Broadway, many of the major events of the 1960s are marked by even more memorable trips to the theater. Two months after enjoying a show where he sat a few rows ahead of the Kennedys, Rich and family attend the matinee on the weekend following President Kennedy's assassination. What at first sounds cold and detached becomes quite moving when the Richs realize that they are not alone. The theater has a packed house of people searching for an afternoon's escape from all that is going on around them.

Rich's life seems suffused with theater. At summer camp he befriends a boy named Harry Stein, whose father, Joe, is writing a musical that will eventually turn into "Fiddler on the Roof." When "Fiddler" is given a trial run at the National theater, Rich is there every day with Harry, watching the show progress and noting its evolution as it prepares for its Broadway debut.

"Ghost Light" is filled with experiences like this. As Rich grows and lives through high school and college, his love and devotion to the theater grows with him. Rich is a talented writer, describing all of his experiences in such a way that they feel familiar and shared. Humble and honest, he writes "Ghost Light" without any of the "Look at what I've done!" moments that pervade so many of the remainder bin memoirs. Rich knows that this is not a one-man show, that a musical can't survive on solos alone.

All "hooks" aside, sometimes it is the simple life -- the life led responsibly and earnestly -- that, when told well, makes for the most moving of memoirs. The world of the young Frank Rich is one with overtures, happy endings, and people who burst into song. One of the reasons Rich enjoys the theater is that it allows a young boy who often feels alone to see himself in these characters and their songs. In the same way, "Ghost Light," in its subtlety and honesty, makes being in its audience just as pleasurable.

Random House
The New York Times

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