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This year so far has been a time for service and reflection, but I have also been reading. I was lucky enough to have landed in the bedroom that has bookshelves. The shelves hold a random assortment of Messiah College yearbooks, Encyclopedias, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and (most wonderfully in my estimation) a 1901 Collector’s Edition of all of Shakespeare’s plays. The book that I’m reviewing today did not come from these books or the scant number of books I brought, but from a local bookstore, Midtown Scholar.

I had gone there to write. And write I did. But while I was writing (and peering at all the characters in the store), one particular book kept staring me down. The title, What the Night Tells the Day, distracted me so much that I had to get it. I wanted to know what indeed the night tells the day. And how does it tell it? Does it whisper? Does it scream?

The cover describes it as a novel, but the introduction says that it is a memoir. An endorsement on the back calls it an autobiography (which makes me inwardly cringe). Whether you call it by the outdated term “autobiography” or more truthful “memoir,” it is clear it is not a novel.

It is the story of the author, Hector Bianciotti, his childhood in Argentina and his migration to France. He relates his Italian immigrant parent’s difficulty of fitting into Argentina society, his strained relationship with his father, and his time in a monastery, all the while discovering his sexuality and his love for literature.

All memoirs are human, but I find that this one was especially human because it reveals both the good and the slightly disturbing qualities of the author. It also relays memories like we remember them: in short little bits when we are young and then clearer, more tangible moments when we are older. Since our childhood memories tend not to line up in linear order, the beginning of the memoir is a little tangled. And as Bianciotti himself says “Like some children, certain memories like to gather together their most insignificant toys.”

Like all memoirs (and most novels), What the Night Tells the Day does not really end. It has an ending, most certainly, but authors cannot write their own deaths. It does somewhat answer some of my previous questions about the book, but the answers are open for interpretation. But it tells Bianciotti’s version of the truth and that is the most memorable and the most important.