Richard Rodriguez, in his "intellectual autobiography" Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez, explores the sources of his alienation from his past, from society, from his family, from himself, and even from his reader. His alienation has not been diminished by his economic and critical success as a writer. The author's philosophy is a personal and pessimistic one. He seems to be angry and bitter over his upbringing and his education, and even his success:
I am . . . taken by the symbols of leisure and wealth. . . . For me those . . . symbols are reassuring reminders of public success. I tempt vulgarity to be reassured. I am filled with the gaudy delight, the monstrous grace of the nouveau riche (136-137).
The book qualifies as an ~"intellectual" autobiography because the author focuses on his own mind, his own reflections on his life, his own often painful self-consciousness. This reader came to feel trapped in the mind of this man because he is so relentlessly focused on his own thinking, his own suffering, and he offers little hope that he is going to ever be anything but alienated and embittered at society's misshaping of him.
The heart of this intellectual autobiography is the author's childhood and his relationship with his family. His greatest alienation is with his parents, and, as with the author's other complaints, this problem seems insoluble. He writes in the beginning of the book that this split from his parents is most important to him:
What preoccupies me is immediate: the separation I endure with my parents in loss . . . the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents (5).
The author's intellectual development has come by way of his family, his Catholic upbringing and education, his secular college education, his experiences with bilingual education and affirmative action, and, of course, his general difficult...