How McDonell came to understand this brand of masculinity is the subject of his lyrical and self-lacerating new memoir.

In an afterword, McDonell says that the book was originally 'going to be about me' — and it really still is, though you can feel him continually trying to steer it back to Irma, like a car that’s out of alignment.

I don’t know of anything else like it. Perhaps in empathy for a powerful female figure, it recalls Jim Harrison’s Dalva. My guess is that McDonell’s book became a voyage of discovery of his mother, but also a chance to unravel his own origins and impulses, a rethinking of his own life events, from the changed viewpoint, the inevitable greater perspective, that comes with age.

In this poignant memoir, a former Esquire editor-in-chief memorializes his mother, the inimitable woman who taught him how to be a man. After the death of McDonell’s father, a WWII fighter pilot, 25-year-old schoolteacher Irma was left to raise her young son alone. She made a new life for them in California, where she raised her son to read widely, love nature, and cultivate independence. This accounts for just Part One of McDonell’s memoir; in Part Two, he makes a bold narrative leap, transitioning to the third-person perspective as he recounts his adult struggles and successes, as well as the challenge of cultivating his own 'philosophy of fatherhood' without a role model. Lyrical and lucid, Irma tells a stirring tale of how our parents shape us—the ones who aren’t there, and the ones who are..

McDonell is a poet at heart...and I can think of no higher compliment than to say Irma deserves its place on the bookshelf next to This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff..

Beautifully written, the book’s uniformly insightful chapters are all brief.

In a narrative brimming with vignettes ranging from humorously innocent to painfully melancholy, McDonell chronicles how he grew increasingly appreciative of Irma and her innate ability to overcome her own grief..

McDonell’s male feminism can be overwrought.