EILEEN TABIOS Engages
Lives Remembered: A Memoir by Linda Ty-Casper
(PALH, 2025)
When one writes autobiography, the intention is to write about one’s life. Linda Ty-Casper takes what may be considered an unexpected approach by writing her memoir through remembering others, as indicated by its title, Lives Remembered. The title would have worked if the two words were reversed, but Ty-Casper privileges other lives instead of herself as the one who remembered.
Her approach touches on the challenges of autobiography, which requires looking back at one’s life and making choices of what to reveal or not. Even when one wants to reveal everything, elements will get left out due to privacy concerns, memory lapses and/or (unconscious) revisions of what happened.
But there is a way to create autobiography in an effective if paradoxical way: choose a specific point of view that becomes the scaffolding with which the author can arrange and organize a life viewed with hindsight. (I know this directly from writing The Inventor, a 2023 autobiography through the scaffolding of literary creations.) It’s a paradoxical approach because, as Oulipians and other practitioners of constraint-based writings know, by choosing to narrow the focus, the writer provides a more in-depth treatment.
In Linda Ty-Casper’s memoir Lives Remembered, the scaffolding is what the title cites. What’s amazing is how many lives Ty-Casper recalls—and not just logical people like family members, friends, and literary contacts but folks she must have met just once (e.g., a poet who—in a moment exemplifying the acuity with which she’s conducted literary analyses—she observed as someone who “laughs deep but [doesn’t] listen”). It helps that, as she affirmed in an email to me, she kept a diary “on and off,” was able to “etch data” in her mind through note-taking, and had access to access personal correspondence for various details.
Those who are remembered are mostly memorable because Ty-Casper felt love or affection for them. In that sense, the resonant writing in the book is apt—one can sense the burnished gold sheen of treasured memories. For example, Linda recalls two family portraits painted over a hundred years ago: “Long ago, itinerant artists peddled partly finished portraits in the provinces, and clients chose the frame on which to have their likeness painted”! (What a fascinating precursor to AI portraying posters in different contexts from their true lives in social media.) For readers not related to Ty-Casper who are less interested in her relatives and more in the times they lived, she provides numerous vibrant and interesting details like these traveling portraitists.
Such details include going to watch Tagalog films “with copies of Liwayway to sit on. There were surot/bedbugs in the chairs,” an incident which I envied because my mother was like Ty-Casper’s mother in thinking movies are not “proper for children.” She also writes—in a Proustian-type manner that, for me, again evoked my childhood with those “shards of glass”—
“In the back, past the kitchen, there were more plants, among clay jars of fish, the colors as bright as flowers. I recall, cupping the fish in my hand to flush down the toilet so they could find their way to the sea. Shards of glass topped the dividing wall. Lines of laundry shifted the sunlight.”
The above excerpt easily shows the effortless lyricism that emanates from her concise imagistic writing, one of Ty-Casper’s strengths as a writer. That line, “lines of laundry shifted the sunlight” is pure poetry. Her resonance remains powerful over a less attractive topic like
“Widespread scarcity resulted after the Japanese began sending food to Japan. People were dying in the streets of Manila, bloated from having only coconut to eat. Market stalls were empty. Tia Pinang and I walked to Malabon to buy dried fish, the size of fingerlings. People were lucky to find binlid, the cracked grains that used to be fed only to chickens. One time a man knocked at the gate. He had not eaten for days. Ninang served him the rice she was saving for breakfast, with adobo sauce left in the pot from supper.”
Ty-Casper lived through significant historic periods for the Philippines: as a U.S. colony, Japanese occupation, Martial Law, Corazon Aquino’s first woman presidency, Rodrigo Duterte’s cruel reign, and the current time when the son of Ferdinand Marcos is, remarkably if not ridiculously, the president.
Much of history’s unfolding is influenced by the past. Lives Remembered is worthwhile reading, highlighted by the Harvard Law School incident that “redirected her life” into becoming a historical fictionist. At the university’s Widener Library, Ty-Casper discovered books that contained “unfair and erroneous” material as regards the Philippines and decided to write an essay refuting them. But upon discovering that some of those books had never been checked out of the library to be read—a detail that reminds how the most insulting thing a writer can experience is not criticism but indifference—she decided to “write a historical novel which might have more staying power/life outside the shelf.”
“Just one book,” Ty-Casper recalled, “then I’d go on with my life.”
More than one book, of course, occurred. The first was The Peninsulars which was set in the 1850s, the period of the British Occupation. This was followed by The Three-Cornered Sun set amidst the 1896 Revolution against Spain; The Stranded Whale which involved the 1899-1901 Philippine American War; and other books that would deal with the Martial Law dictatorship, among others. She remembers and affirms her decision to turn from law to literature:
“Only after many years, with the UP Law Class ’55 (whose valedictorian I had been) having fun designating me the Class ‘deviate’ for writing instead of practicing, did I realize that writing is a form of advocacy. I was defending the country against unwarranted ‘smearing’.”
Lives Remembered does touch on other facets of Ty-Casper’s life besides the literary, including family relations, her involvement with the anti-Martial Law group Friends of the Filipino People, and her relationship with Leonard Casper, the poet, fictionist, and literary critic who became her husband. But remembering others could not prevent how her memoir inevitably highlights her literary—and historic—life. Indeed, Casper became one of the strongest supporters of Philippine literature in English and his critical role as a critic might be attributed as well to Ty-Casper (for additional details, see my review of Leonard Casper’s biography).
If, indeed, someone deserves to be remembered by Ty-Casper, it would be her husband whose support would make all writers long for such a spouse or partner. Ty-Casper’s descriptions of her husband’s encouragement include:
“Len continued to encourage my writing. I had written short stories while waiting for the Bar results. On my last day at Harvard I wrote a short story, ‘The Longer Ritual.’ Len read each page of the stories and novels. He typed and xeroxed them. He packaged and sent them out with accompanying letters to editors. He was even happier than I when I got published. One time, receiving my letter about the University of the Philippines Women Lawyers’ Circle Incorporated (WILOCI) meeting—I was in the Philippines—he wrote back:
Do you still feel you have to compare yourself? I feel sorry if you do. You are unique—if underestimated and under rewarded. You will probably affect the country in the long run more than law practice might have. I know better than anyone else how well you write. What kind of knowledge and insight and craft you bring to your ‘fictions.’ Of course, you can’t expect recognition if you don’t cooperate, at least minimally with someone as sincere as Frankie Jose when he offers an autograph party or something like that. There’s nothing dishonest about such an effort, especially so modest a one. I know you are a writer whatever else you may be; and that you write well, if too meticulous perhaps.”
Casper even supported her poetry. She recently shared her poem “Running Secretly, Singing” (which was only the second poem she’d written after a childhood poem, “The Ant,” for which she received one peso). One of Ty-Casper’s responses to The Halo Halo Review’s publication of her poem (and my writing on her poem) is to wish that her husband (1923-2018) would have had a chance to read them.
Despite her powerful writing, Ty-Casper also understates the emotional content of certain experiences. For example, she mentions three incidents of racism, the first occasioning the familiar “Go back where you came from” attack, a familiar insult to many people of color in the U.S. While impactful, the three incidents are all referenced in a single paragraph. She could have said more about those experiences (she stood up to her attackers) but chose not to, an understatement that ironically reveals how racism is an old—thus boring despite being dangerous—story.
Still, Ty-Casper’s understatements can be funny. In her chapter “1998. Philippine Centennial” which marked the 100th anniversary of the Philippines’ proclamation of Philippine Independence (from Spanish colonization), she writes:
“August 22. Breakfast 6:30 a.m. John Larkin panel. He asked me to translate a poem for his book. Press coverage minimal. Mexican star getting all the attention.”
I laughed even as I empathized over this entry—most writers probably would be bypassed for “Mexican star(s).”
Yet her understated approach also can be the more effective technique. Her chapter on her mother Catalina Velasquez-Ty is powerful because the emotionally fraught last days of dying and the toll taken on caregivers become more charged from terse daily accounts. Especially for readers who have experienced care-giving for a loved one’s last days, this chapter is easily inhabitable as the brief accounts create expansive spaces for empathy as the reader personalizes the experience.
Indeed, more needs to be written about Ty-Casper’s writing techniques. I sense that what I call “understatement” doesn’t fully capture her writing strategy(ies). She’s noted that, as manifested by her short chapters, she must finish first drafts at one sitting “or let go” of them. What she seeks is a certain strength or power that is so strong that it surfaces whole at first draft. She describes letting go of one short story as follows:
“Idea for short story came, but not intense enough to be insistent.”
I think her work affirms the rightness of her point of view, with her best work displaying the insistency that comes from sufficient internal rumination, e.g. her 1985 novel Awaiting Trespass (A Pasión).
Ultimately, I feel that Lives Remembered, while impactful on its own and critical in Ty-Casper’s oeuvre, is also a memoir that begs for a more fulsome biography. I write this review partly because I want to make this suggestion, and hope someone in the future takes up this necessary challenge.
~~
Two accounts in the last chapter of Ty-Casper’s memoir provide a fitting ending. The first relates to her self-criticism of being “unable to sustain kindness” in certain situations such as:
“I think of the old man who asked the servidora at the Chinese store for the piece of ham left on the knife she used to slice pieces for Dad, who left quickly when she shook her head. I could have given him what I got for Dad.”
This—almost stray account—is one of the most memorable incidents in the book and, ironically, it is the remembrance of a stranger. Its effect (decades later as Ty-Casper wrote her memoir) reminds how kindness should always be privileged as a factor in our lives. Surely it’s no coincidence that Ty-Casper includes this encounter in her last chapter, and I’m glad Ty-Casper ends her memoir by showing how the unplanned can have an outsize effect in our lives.
But she also ends her memoir with this account and it’s fitting:
“I no longer have the energy to be able to go back to the historical novels; to the American campaigns in Mindanao; but perhaps… children/grandchildren will write about the atrocities. There is the need to call attention to the role of guerrillas and civilians in the liberation of the Philippines during World War II. There are still boxes of clippings books on the War in an upstairs room…”
Recently, Linda Ty-Casper turned 94 years old. Through her books, she turned her life into a gift to the Philippines. With gratitude, we should mind the lessons of that life: not writing so much as speaking on our own behalf instead of letting others determine our identity and history. As she’s noted, “If history is our biography, literature is our autobiography.”
*****
Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent releases include the poetry collections Engkanto in the Diaspora and Because I Love You, I Become War; a novel The Balikbayan Artist; an art monograph Drawing Six Directions; an autobiography, The Inventor: A Poet’s Transcolonial Autobiography; and a flash fiction collection Getting To One. Other books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times which was translated by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon and two French poetry books, PRISES (Double Take) (trans. Fanny Garin) and La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery). Forthcoming in 2026 is a selected art stories collection, The Erotic Space Around Objects. Her literary inventions include the "Kapwa novel"; the hay(na)ku, a 21st century diasporic poetic form; the MDR Poetry Generator that create poems totaling theoretical infinity; the “Flooid” poetry form that’s rooted in a good deed; and the monobon poetry form based on the monostich. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
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