At lunch today, I noticed that Bird Cloud was featured in the "Briefly Noted" section of capsule book reviews in the Feb. 7 issue of The New Yorker. Whoever wrote the capsule review concludes by speculating that at certain times, AP's Wyoming neighbors must be as contemptuous of her as she so clearly is of them. That led me to wonder--seriously--why on earth would you write a memoir that makes you look like such a bad-tempered, mean-spirited, snobbish old crank? 
I mean, seriously, why would anyone do that?
Lack of personal insight?
I remember having a similar species of reaction when I was hired to do extensive edits on a memoir of a survivor of Sobibor death camp, who was barely out of his youth at the time he was sent there. Sobibor, for those who don't know, is the camp where the Nazis disastrously mixed Jewish civilian prisoners with Soviet prisoners of war, and the Soviet officers (there were a handful of them) organized a spectacular escape over the barbed wire under towers with snipers posted. This man, Toivi Blatt, escaped with the Soviets and 70 other inmates, and hid in the countryside, some of them eventually making the way to permanent freedom. Most were shot in the back going over the barbed wire.
Now part of the reason why it was so dangerous for Jews on the run in Poland is because there WAS a significant discrepancy, socioeconomically, between shtetl Jewish families who were moneylenders and shopkeepers (lacking access to most other occupations) and their far poorer Catholic countrymen, so there was a certain initial enthusiasm in the local Catholic population in turning over Jews who they felt were unfairly benefitting from the bad economy. It was a horrific cliche that Jews always had gold coins buried somewhere to bribe their way out of prosecution or other minor lawbreaking; and of course it defied the reality that there were poor Jews as well as rich Jews in Poland.
However, in this manuscript, the protagonist portrayed himself as having gold coins sewn into his clothes and bribing himself out of tight spots, paying gold for food, and hiring rides from people he thought he could trust, and exchanging precious gems (once again sewn into his clothes) for a night's hiding place. He was describing the rich Jewish stereotype to a nicety.
I was completely baffled, and I didn't know how to tell him his own narrative was reinforcing the Polish Catholic stereotypes of Jews and he might want to play that down. And of course, he didn't see any issue there. Everybody travels with precious gems and gold sewn into their clothes, don't they?
