Knapp crafts an intelligent and reflective memoir about returning to teach at her high school alma mater. The author gracefully weaves in autobiographical details from her past while also offering a nuanced perspective on the history of the American south, education, ethnic and cultural diversity, religious faith, and how preconceptions can be rewritten, among many other subjects.
Knapp is an excellent writer with a sharp ear for phrasing and a knack for fine descriptive language. Structurally, the work is highly polished, with time jumps secured via established thematic threads. The memoir's depth of subject matter is remarkably cohesive in this capable writer's hands.
Memoirs are frequently focused on unexpected life diversions. I'm History...But Do I Repeat Myself? stands apart through eloquent writing and the author's capacity for critical reflection and honest scrutiny of her life choices, experiences, and convictions.
The book is soundly structured and sophisticated. The author effectively builds an erudite narrative that carries intellectual and emotional weight, and as such stands out from the crowd of beat-by-beat life story recollections of many of its contemporaries.

Book Life Prize Review
January 16, 2025

Lee Knapp has delivered such wit, vulnerability, honesty, history, perspective, humanity, guts, heart, and challenge to learn…stunning! This is a book to keep around to reference over time.
B.C., Richmond, VA

Compelling as a straight-up memoir, the book creatively adds a mashup of bits of public history and then interestingly ties those to the stories of personal and communal change. I see the book as a unique bildungsroman, one in which the old-soul girl moves into middle age by way of repetitive stresses, lots of hard work and daily traumas. She finally pushes through the looking glass (admittedly with a few sharp cuts)--to discover herself suddenly lighter, freer, and not so old (even in soul), after all. At times, I could have believed I was reading a hilarious Clyde Edgerton novel; at others, an insightful Atlantic article on history in the making. Knapp writes clearly, honestly, interestingly and entertainingly. Pulling back the veil on difficult people and relationships, she finds opportunities to humanize without excusing and to reveal her own limitations alongside theirs, as well. V. K. Richmond, VA

Lee Knapp tackles big, significant subjects like faith, race, and, yes, history—but she does it with a gentle touch and a puckish humor. Not just her own story, I’m History is a sort of meta-memoir of a whole generation. Her clear-eyed honesty as she pries open and grapples with some of the most difficult issues of our time gives the reader the security of a trusted guide into fraught territory.
That Anne Bradstreet, Fred Flintstone, and Paul Simon all make appearances here demonstrates both breadth of reach and Knapp’s unique perspective on her time and place. From her farmhouse in rural Virginia, she perceptively casts her eye over her own history as well as its meanings in the wider world. As her reader goes with her on her quest, they will be challenged, entertained, and enlightened by her story and may never look at their own the same way again either. D.P. Charlottesville, VA

This is Lee Knapp’s honest, brave, and timely memoir about her life’s journey growing up in the American South. When she returns to teaching in a familiar public school with a widely diverse student body, Lee continues to expand, reflect, and question her faith, Southern roots, race, and family.

The narrative displays Lee’s gifts of storytelling, sense of humor, and her ability to link her past to America’s history. Her memoir provides plenty of discussion topics for today’s world, while encouraging her readers to engage in their own self-reflection.

Lee’s fourth-grade teacher’s report card comment was “Lee has a talent for writing”. In twelfth grade she was voted Most Likely to Succeed, which she calls “a cruel test to place on a life”. I would say that she passed the test to succeed as she shares her talent for writing and by giving us her memoir.

With her trademark turns of phrase and exquisite vocabulary, Lee Knapp treats us to an examination of both cultural history and her own personal history, knitting them together in ways that keep your nose in the book until the last page!