Dobbs the Reluctant Memoirist

Dobbs writes in the rhythm of a seasoned reporter, albeit a reluctant reporter of his mother's love story, in his Atavist published book My Mother's Lover. His sentences are straightforward, descriptive of time and place and significance. While he paints scenes from conversations and an email from his brother, personal encounters with the other family members, and struggles to physically track down Norman's grave shared by phone with his half-sister, his paintings are minimalist. For instance, the whale cue to release the leis doesn’t include a sense of his brother’s emotion or focus, like he decided to…, or his own at the retelling: I can almost hear the rattle and the shish of the physical remnants of the woman I called mother, the woman whose smile expanded broadly upon the consummation of my many searches for her, finding her in the garden…The emotion is guarded, finally shared out of concern that the reader only sees the “other woman” as he creates the flashbacks that construct his story.

After clicking through to Dobbs website his analytical style makes perfect sense. He is a son of two medical minds; the site tells us that he writes on the “genetics of temperament,” his writing is included in “science anthologies.”

So, how does an analytical writer write his mother’s love affair? He explains how he got started on the task, why it begged to be written. He carefully considers the implications on the lives of those his mother’s affair touched. The wronged wife. The abandoned children, now grown. He takes us from the present to the necessary moments of the past, skillfully drawing attitude speculations out of a progression of photo images, recording emotion in the words of the lover’s letters on his ill-fated night. And he considers the existential question, with Norman’s daughter, placing us with them on his southwestern patio; had the affair become a marriage he would never have existed. He is fair in his assessments of guilt and extenuating circumstances of war, cultural shift.

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Dobbs writes of his mother as Norman's pin-up-girl, somewhat similar to the seductive look on this Rita Hayworth Movie poster, hard to believe now—but it was scandalously
revealing for the time. A difficulty that Dobbs has with his mother’s newly altered image from these revelations. And a telling look at the daring rebel she loved. 


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All things considered, I would dub his book narrative but not fully literary. But that’s just me.