“On Giving and Forgiving,” Review of MY BEARD: MEMOIR STORIES by Sharon Doubiago

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EXCERPT: Sharon Doubiago’s vibrant career as a poet, memoirist, teacher, and chronicler has most recently given readers My Beard: Memoir Stories, what her included biography calls “a memoir in the form of individual stories rather than the on-going narrative of traditional memoir.” Though the term “beard” calls to mind disguises—costume-shop props as well as pretended heterosexual relationships—Doubiago can’t be accused of hiding behind one in any of these remembered encounters. If anything, her accounts are painfully bare, raw in the sense that even with the balm of time and reflection, the reader can feel her frequent heartache and sometimes physical agony crackling outward from the pages.

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