[[Paisley Rekdal,]] of Chinese/white heritage, has written, in [Intimate] what I think of as a themed memoir, parallelling her own story with another passionate interest, the photographs of Edward Curtis. The text alternates between poetry inspired by specific photographs, historical and speculative vignettes of Curtis and his Crow assistant, Alexander Upshaw, and reflections on her own childhood and her parents, with the closest focus on the recent past when her mother was in the hospital for an operation on a cancer. There are no grand conclusions, more a search for connections and understanding about ethnicity. Rekdal ‘looks’ a bit exotic, but it is not dramatic and therefore, people are often puzzled by her in a way she has found unsettling, as if, by not being identifiable, she isn’t really visible and isn’t considered ‘whole’. The Indians, during the time Curtis was photographing them, were vanishing. Upshaw was a prime example of a person who was ‘between worlds’ - educated at the school in Carlisle and not raised in the traditional manner as his mother had chosen to live in a town and work as a seamstress for as long as she could make that work. Does the book work? It did for me - I like this kind of memoir that isn’t just focussed on the self - it’s definitely a ‘sub’ genre of the memoir field that often lifts what could be a exercise in self indulgence, to a meaningful and illuminating reading experience. ****1/2 ( )