Memoir recounts professor’s family journey

Memoir
recounts professor’s family journey
…………………………………………………………………

BY ELLEN CHANG
Rice News Staff

Eight years ago
when Marsha Recknagel’s nephew appeared at her doorstep
without warning, her first impulse was to tell him to go
down the street to a refuge for runaway teenagers. Instead,
she took him into her home and ultimately adopted him.

She recounts
their journey in her new, highly acclaimed memoir, “If
Nights Could Talk.” Recknagel, who teaches creative
writing at Rice, has received rave reviews. Excerpted in
the September issue of Vogue, praised in Oprah’s magazine
and listed as recommended reading in Elle magazine, the
memoir was cited by Publisher’s Weekly as “off
to a strong start.” Recently, the Washington Post wrote
that “Recknagel is to be admired, not just for the
quality of her prose but for her relentless self-scrutiny.”

The book chronicles
six years of their ups and downs, their developing trust
and transforming friendship.

Recknagel recounts
her difficulties with Dante, which began with the discovery
of his severe sleep apnea. As the reviewer in O Magazine
wrote: “The news only got worse.” The decision
to help Dante was complicated for Recknagel because of her
family history. In her memoir, she frequently ventures into
the past to give a larger context for the present dilemma
of helping Dante recover from the 10 years of trouble with
his unstable parents.

Recknagel said
she wrote the book because she “wanted to get to the
bottom of why one boy would end up being such a magnet for
a whole family’s energy.”

Through Dante,
Recknagel said she has learned patience and a sense that
not every crisis is the end of the world.

“I learned
that good intentions make up for a lot of misguided bad
behavior,” she said.
She explained that she would find herself yelling or crying
or taking the low road in arguments with Dante and then
beating herself over the head later. “I’d think,
all is now lost,” she said. “There is no going
back.”

Recknagel said
she learned that one can apologize and move on. The hardest
task for her “was to see him on his own terms and meet
him anew as a human being I’d just met,” she said.

After reading
the entire memoir for the first time, Dante understood that
he was not just on the receiving end of the relationship.
He had also taught her important lessons.

“We created
a new form of family,” she said. “We are sort
of a claptrap, makeshift reinvention of the family.”

Before coming
to Recknagel, Dante had felt many of the pieces of the puzzle
of his past were missing. The memoir explains how his gypsy-like
parents had taken him on “a 10-year odyssey.”
Before he ran away, he had lived in four states and been
in 26 schools, one group home, one boarding school and two
mental hospitals.

“He did
not know how to proceed with the future because the past
was such a mystery,” Recknagel said. She tried to sort
it out for him in the book, though, she explained, she wound
up sorting it out for herself also.

“I couldn’t
stop writing once I started,” she said. “It was
pouring out of me. I wanted to give it as a gift to Dante.”

While teaching
at Rice, Recknagel earned a master’s in fine arts in
l999 from Bennington College writing seminars. She completed
the manuscript that became the memoir during her two and
a half years at Bennington. Reck-nagel received a Ph.D.
in literature in l988 and has taught in the Rice English
department for the past 10 years.
Her memoir has garnered praise from authors Rosellen Brown,
Robert Stone and Susan Cheever. She will give readings in
the fall in New York City, Washington, D.C., Williamstown,
Mass., Memphis and Nashville, Tenn., and New Orleans.