Book Review

The power of an essay collection is often in how each piece uncovers a small truth, and together these truths blossom into greater shared revelations about life. Award-winning author and memoirist Sue William Silverman does just this in her recent essay collection, Selected Misdemeanors: Essays at the Mercy of the Reader (University of Nebraska Press, 2025), where she shows us that life is non-linear and we are always the sum of our parts.

With shifting points of view, flash pieces and fragments, poetry and photos, this collection is written with precision and deep emotional resonance. The most difficult memories, as well as the most ordinary, reveal how we perceive ourselves and our relationships with others, and each piece stirred feelings of joy, pain, and longing. I was equally struck by essays that share intimate reflections on past relationships or traumas as by those that focus on seemingly innocuous subjects—like the confines of a carwash or an endless commute to an adjunct teaching job—that still lingered with me afterward.

Silverman also experiments with form to construct the sequence of the overall collection. For instance, she punctuates her flawlessly braided essays with a series of postcards to her future selves, and photos of “Miss Demeanor,” an alter ego of the narrator, each with accompanying poems. While there is a clear progression—from essays that feel more like looking back at her past self to those rooted in present-day meditations—the collection also spirals, with revelations deepening and building along the way.

For instance, the essay “Love Deferment” brilliantly weaves together the story of Freddie, her pet goldfish—whose likeness appears on the cover of Selected Misdemeanors—and Michael, her boyfriend’s roommate who broke off their affair after a pregnancy scare. She hopes both will keep her company while she lives alone in D.C. and her boyfriend is away at boot camp. “Love Deferment” is then followed by a photograph of the author, presumably from her time in D.C., and a poem titled “Miss Demeanor Considers the First of Many Jobs at Which She’ll Fail, Not Interested in the Passage of Legislation on Capitol Hill or Much Else, except Meeting Congressmen behind Closed Doors.”

Silverman writes with a narrative distance that allows us to be immersed in that moment and then swooped away by a profound take-away. Like many of Silverman’s essays, “Love Deferment” contains nuggets of self-reflective wisdom: “. . . Maybe I felt most at home in myself when I was making decisions certain to end in disaster.” This happens in many other pieces, each time leaving me with an “aha” moment.

Silverman handles the memories and the “emotional misdemeanors” of her former self with a razor-sharp clarity but one without shame. Reading this collection made me feel as if I was peeling away layers to reveal a more wholly formed character and invited me to reflect on the complicated loops and patterns that exist within our lives. Selected Misdemeanors invites us to do what often feels impossible—to reframe difficult memories, not as good or bad, but as glimpses into a larger whole. Silverman does this with eloquence, reminding us that we can own our stories and meet our past selves with empathy.