Draft No. 4

What we write about tells us who we are…

December 1, 2012 | 4 Comments

The reblogged post above is by Cristian Mihai, a young Romanian fiction writer, a self-publisher with a big following, and a talented blogger with many fans. After my last post, which mused about differences between the practice of fiction and nonfiction, I was struck by Chuck Palahniuk’s quote regarding the use of self in fiction—it applies as well to nonfiction. Especially to personal and dramatized nonfiction, to memoir essays and books. Writing about the broken or pained self without the …

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Truth and beauty redux

November 28, 2012 | 6 Comments

Nonfiction faces challenges in writing from another’s point of view; but do the genre’s constraints limit its claims to art? A version of the post below first appeared January 20, 2009. I was thinking about it because I re-read Tim O’Brien’s revered short story “The Things They Carried,” and read for the first time Ron Hansen’s immortal short story “Wickedness,” both of them very essayistic. And O’Brien’s, anyway, is often claimed by practitioners of creative nonfiction because it seems autobiographical. …

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Black and white and gray

November 24, 2012 | 11 Comments

Memoirist or monster? What gives writers the right? When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.—Czeslaw Milosz We all know that view. Talking last week to a friend about Emily Rapp’s Poster Child memoir, reviewed here, my friend mentioned Rapp’s forthcoming memoir about her disabled son who is dying, or possibly already dead, from Tay-Sachs disease. “I can’t imagine doing that,” she said. “I think I’d have other things on my mind.” I looked at her, …

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Emily Rapp’s satisfying memoir

November 18, 2012 | 14 Comments

Her tale of physical disability depicts an inner transformation. Poster Child: A Memoir by Emily Rapp. Bloomsbury, 226 pp. This semester my freshman honors students and I have read six memoirs and Sven Birkerts’s The Art of Time in Memoir (reviewed) in my themed composition class, “Tales of Dangerous Youth.” As with novels, coming of age stories are common in memoir. It has pleased me to see students who hadn’t read a memoir, or who had read one bad one, …

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Junot Díaz: Voice of a genius

November 14, 2012 | 9 Comments

The novelist holds up a mirror to society through narrative. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz Riverhead Books, 213 pp., $26.95. Guest Review by Lanie Tankard “I stand in for the absolute silence in our communities.”—Junot Díaz Will Junot Díaz add the National Book Award to his shelf of literary prizes? He’s one of five fiction finalists for the honor to be announced on November 14. Díaz has already scooped up so many awards, however, that he’s a …

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The sum of their parts

November 10, 2012 | 11 Comments

Graphic memoirs like Speigelman’s & Bechdel’s merit attention. Guest Post by Janice Gary At the beginning of my third semester of a graduate writing program, the professor handed out a reading list that included Art Speigelman’s Maus. It seemed an odd choice for a nonfiction program, even if was autobiographical. I knew about Maus. In fact, I had avoided reading it for years. The book dealt with the Holocaust, which was so personally painful that I avoided any books or …

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Four more years

November 7, 2012 | 16 Comments

Means, ends & inner narratives in the 2012 presidential campaign. Barack Obama was mocked by Republicans when, late in the campaign just ended, he blamed his struggle to dominate Mitt Romney on his failure to provide Americans with a compelling narrative. I couldn’t help but agree. And yet I wonder if even a writer as talented as Obama can do anything more than animate his partisans’ own existing narratives. Romney’s narrative was widely exposed, commented upon, and derided as a …

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Draft No. 4

For almost five years, this blog was called Narrative. As I explained in a 2013 post, I rechristened it in honor of my book’s transforming draft. The best compliment the blog and I have received came in from a fellow writer, though someone I’ve never met, when I wrote about getting a book contract in Spring 2013: “This blog, its urgency, steady fervor and insight into the art has earned you readers.”—DeWitt Henry

Richard's books

The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead

by David Shields

I loved this inquiry and lament about human mortality, a stealth memoir in which we learn about the author indirectly, mostly in relation to his vibrant, dominating 97-year-old father.

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster

by Jon Krakauer

For some reason not as engaging to me as Into the Wild but a great account; his spare style failed to help me see the mountain, but by the end I felt its cold. I am troubled by the human costs of the sport, as is Krakauer, who seems perm...

House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home

by Mark Richard

A fascinating experiment in point of view: it opens with an overview in distancing third-person; then it becomes a story told in differently distancing second person. His childhood and child self are fascinating. For me, he did not full...

Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals

by Hal Herzog

As a dog owner, an “animal lover,” and a former farmer, I largely enjoyed Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat. Author Hal Herzog’s message is simple and clear: humans’ relationship with animals is illogical and emotional. My bona fid...

Fierce Attachments: A Memoir

by Vivian Gornick

Gornick’s truths blaze off the page, her portraits of others transfix, her sentences and rhythms delight. What she remembers, she says, of growing up in a Jewish tenement in the Bronx, is a building full of women: "Shrewd, volatile, u...