Reviewed by Alexis David
The Mystery of Memory:
Jazz June: A Self-Portrait in Essays
by Clifford Thompson
University of Georgia Press
Oct 2025, 168 Pages, ISBN: 9780820374642
Clifford Thompson begins his book of personal essays, Jazz June, with outer space. It is 1968, in Washington, D.C. Thompson is five-years-old. It is a warm night and he describes his neighborhood with luscious prose:
In my memory this sleepiness was at its sweetest in the spring and summer, when the front doors of houses up and down my street were routinely left open to let the breeze in, when, as darkness came, people rocked on metal gliders on their small porches, when sounds were mostly of cicadas whirring and crickets chirping and the occasional car passing with a lazy roar up the street, when the only movement was of moths floating near the yellow glow of the streetlamps.
Amongst this neighborhood bliss, Thompson looks up to the sky and sees not one, but two moons. This mystery, like many of the memories in the collection, haunts him into adulthood. He is perplexed by the strangeness of the event. How can there be two moons in the sky?
So, why start the collection with outer space? With a childhood self looking up to the night sky in awe? For me, the undercurrent of this book is an older narrator looking back at a young self who is perplexed by an unknown or hidden world. This makes for a relatable sensation: the older self understanding something the younger self didn’t grasp. Maybe that’s why beginning with the moons is so beautiful. Perhaps Thompson starts here because this small mystery serves as a metaphor for the entire collection: twenty-two essays that examine the ordinary strangeness of his own life. Thompsons writes in the second essay of the collection, “My life has been fascinating (though mainly to me) because of an inner journey.” Thompson has a rich inner life that he graciously shares with the reader. He is generous in his vulnerability.
Much later in the book, he writes, “[w]hat is a personal essayist if not self-obsessed?” However, this book reads not as narcissism, but as a writer in his late fifties trying to understand the many mysteries of his life. From childhood to parenthood, from early love to marriage, from the loss of his parents to telling his own daughters about his eventual death, and a bit about race and the complexities of being a Black man in America, Thompson writes about himself as a way to understand himself, and in doing so, gives us a narrator who is relatable, funny, charming in his mistakes and confusions and, most comforting, a narrator who can offer his reader some guidance on their own life. Perhaps for Thompson, the personal essay is a way of examining memory and making meaning from the bits and bobs that we hold in our mind everyday. In his essay, “Equinox,” Thompson writes of a teenage self thinking about his own future, “When you’re seventeen, your twenties, thirties, and forties . . .may seem like unknown, mysterious lands to be explored.”
In one of my favorite essays of the collection, “Long Red Monte Carlo” which marks the second part of the book (where he moves from D.C. to New York City) Thompson tells us of his lifelong desire to be a writer. It is a pursuit that confuses him; “I was struggling for some semblance of success as a writer, another journey on which I felt lost.” He tells us of the car he bought and then sold–preferring instead the subway because he could read on the trains. This essay moves languidly, like many of the essays in the collection. He begins in 1985 with the car, then he takes us to New York City and then to many years later, when he is living in Brooklyn with his family and he is watching the soccer game of his daughters and his mind drifts off to the soccer coach who is about twenty-years older than him (Thompson is 41 at the time). The coach is moving energetically around the field. Thompson writes, “I thought of how many good years I had ahead of me, and how much time I could spend reading and learning . . . and I felt a quiet surge of joy.” This is a hopeful and relatable book with a curious and energetic narrator guiding us through a life well-explored.
Throughout Jazz June, I found myself eagerly following Thompson, who, as a five-year-old, looked up to the moon, and seeing two moons, felt frightened because his perception of the world went “radically against [his] learned notions of how the world ought to work.” Later in this essay, Thompson reveals some possible explanations for these two moons. It might have been a “vapor tracer experiment using a sounding rocket” or it might have been that this memory is distorted. It happened forty-eight years ago and the past can be a bit foggy. However, what I find interesting is Thompson’s analysis of this event; namely, why does he care so much about these mysteries? He writes, “some mysteries of my life have to be solved soon, if at all.” It’s a kind of mid-life crisis. However, instead of a traditional mid-life crisis, like an affair or a convertible, Thompson wants to solve the mysteries of his life because he wants to discover who he is “in this big, endlessly mystifying world.”
About the reviewer: Alexis David is a poet and fiction writer who holds a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, an M.Ed from Canisius College and an MFA from New England College. Dancing Girl Press published her chapbook The Names of Animals I Have Loved. Additionally, she has placed reviews of poetry for Tupelo Quarterly, North of Oxford, Compulsive Reader and The Masters Review. Links to her other published work can be found here: https://alexisldavid.wixsite.com/alexis.