Artifact: A Memoir

Michael Riley’s Artifact: A Memoir is an exploration into the cultural geography of American life. With his Viennese immigrant mother and Arkansan father, both ambitious to claim new territories and roles different from those they were born into, the author attempts to show the effects of aspiration on his family. From the Deep South to the Northeast to the Pacific Northwest, the Riley family bring their flamboyant differentness along with them, daring others to discount them and welcoming the fight to be uniquely, fabulously themselves.

Ed Riley, the youngest son of a prosperous Little Rock businessman, and Helene Kastinger, a survivor of bombings and gunfire from her childhood in World War II, meet in Copenhagen, marry in a hurry, and don’t let any moss grow as they tour the world from Europe to Asia and Oceania. Having children enter the picture slows them down, but even after a girl and three boys join the family, they rarely miss a beat. They almost never do.

Michael and his siblings move from city and state and region, both parents together and apart chasing academic careers. The memoir describes the individual settings and their denizens: like a modern Alexis de Toqueville, he comments on the strangeness and familiarity of each new locale to which he’s forced to adjust. Failures and successes, loneliness and the search for a love and togetherness on their own terms, this book shows a family using all its resilience, native intelligence, and hard work ethic to escape the chaos of their shared lives—and to build individual ones that will bring them that small measure of peace they knew was possible and never gave up on achieving.