Sleep-Deprived With Twins in Rome, Doerr Still Manages Magic
(July 10, 2025) — “Four Seasons in Rome” is likely the best memoir ever written or, at least the best memoir I’ve read. It meets every qualifying aspect of what a good memoir should be made of, except the element of transformation, which can be remedied later.
For those of you who have not had the good fortune to read Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, “All the Light We Cannot See,” reading this memoir should whet your appetite. “Four Seasons in Rome” is part travel log, part writing on writing, and most important, part introduction to parenthood. Parenthood is critical. Doerr dedicates the book to his sons, Henry and Owen, who were six months old when Doerr and his wife Shauna packed up a year’s worth of what they believed they’d need for one year of life in Rome, The Eternal City.
Anonymously chosen to submit work to the American Academy in Rome (the beginning pages of his eventual Pulitzer novel) Doerr is selected and wins a year in Rome, including an apartment, a monthly stipend, and a room with his name on the door at the Academy. It is a year to live and write. Now, try to imagine a city you’ve never been to, a language you can only speak with an Italian to English dictionary, and six-month-old twin boys, your introduction to parenthood and insomnia.
Everything is new except the city, Eternal. A kitchen with no oven, no AC, and babies, months away from sleeping through the night. What Doerr does have is a curious mind ready to take note of everything Roman, from the Umbrella pine outside their apartment gate to the still-standing Panthenon, built atop the ruins of Roman antiquity.
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Doerr doesn’t have a specific assignment. Certainly, he works on his novel, but also on a short story, journal notes, and hours upon hours reading Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History.” What does Doerr gain from reading a historian born in AD23? Enough observed wisdom, empathy, and humor to validate his own instinct to notice everything above and under the ground they walk on.
Daily life for both Shauna and Anthony includes learning to point, not touch, the produce they want, to understand that pedestrians have no rights, beauty can be found everywhere, and the boys will not cry (scream) forever. The Vatican and the death of Pope John Paul II are presented with “You-Are-There” immediacy.
Do you ever wonder exactly what it takes to write? The nitty-gritty of the task. Doerr lays it out splendidly. Does he need to spell out the transformative impact of his year in Rome? Does the word Pulitzer help? “Four Seasons in Rome” amuses, teaches, and invites its readers to take the time to notice everything, people, animals, the serious, the frightening, the mysterious, the miraculous, the mundane, and then remember those things; the stories, the lives, existing today, as they did yesterday and will tomorrow. “Four Seasons in Rome.” A treasure.
Sunny Solomon
Sunny Solomon holds an MA in English/Creative Writing, San Francisco State University. She is a book reviewer for “The Clayton Pioneer” and her poetry and other writing has been published in literary journals, one chapbook, In the Company of Hope and the collection, Six Poets Sixty-six Poems. She was the happy manager of Bonanza Books, Clayton, CA and Clayton Books, Clayton, CA. She continues to moderate a thriving book club that survived the closure of the store from which it began. Sunny currently lives next to the Truckee in Reno, NV.