emotion

Review: ‘Half A Life’ memoir

April 4, 2011 | 5 Comments

Darin Strauss’s sad and somber gift to others from his suffering: stunning in its artistry, honesty. Half a Life: A Memoir by Darin Strauss. Random House, 187 pp. Everybody wants life to speak to them with special kindness.—Darin Strauss I was surprised—but pleased—when Darin Strauss’s memoir Half A Life recently won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle award for autobiography. I hadn’t heard much buzz about the book. The judges called it a “brave and heartbreaking account,” placing it ahead of finalists that …

[Read More]

The reporter as artist

March 30, 2011 | 3 Comments

Archibald MacLeish on the fine line between poetry and journalism. “What is uttered from the heart alone, will win the hearts of others to your own.” —Goethe “I was signed up in the Writer’s Workshop at Iowa, so I was a poet and they didn’t let you cross over. If you said you were a poet, then you had to write in those funny lines. You couldn’t switch. But when I started writing nonfiction, memoir, and the kind of prose …

[Read More]

Playing with pain

March 2, 2011 | 10 Comments

I noticed about myself and others years ago that humans tack from mood to mood. This was codified for me recently by a member of my writing posse. “People spend a lot of time trying to fight off bad moods,” John said, or words to that effect. Writers, and perhaps any independent worker, become keenly aware at times of the need to manage themselves—to deal with their fluctuating feelings and inevitable setbacks. Two and a half weeks ago I was …

[Read More]

Noted: Honesty & emotion in memoir

February 16, 2011 | 3 Comments

“All memoirs have one thing in common: each book charts the struggle between the subject of the memoir and the self. Almost always the subject is something other than the writer while the self, of course, is the writer.”—Thomas Larson Tom Larson is an author, essayist, and journalist. He’s a generous writing-world friend, one with slightly different taste in memoirs than mine, neither of which negates the fact that he’s a flat-out brilliant theorist of memoir. I favor narrative-driven memoirs, …

[Read More]

Kindle (& Updike) redux

February 5, 2011 | 15 Comments

As I was saying early in January, I was almost through Jonathan Franzen’s 576-page novel Freedom—wow, what a Mississippi river of a book, churning with social criticism, human portraits, narrative power—when I dropped and broke my Christmas Kindle. In two days I was reading again, on a device officially known as “Richard’s 2nd Kindle,” rushed from the Amazon mothership. Since then I have read on it four more books: Franzen’s delicious memoir The Discomfort Zone; J.R. Moehringer’s hearty bestselling memoir …

[Read More]

For teachers & kind souls elsewhere

October 26, 2010 | 9 Comments

“Ideals and opportunities and social theorizing are just fine, but if you must understand only one thing, it is this: a warm hand and words whispered into the ear are what we want. Paths that can be seen and followed and walked upon are what we most need. “And in the end, the thing that feeds us, no matter how tenuous, is what we will reach for.” This excerpt is from Ghostbread, a memoir by Sonja Livingston. University of Georgia …

[Read More]

‘Ron Carlson Writes a Story’

August 1, 2010 | 7 Comments

Review of a fine little book on how to sit there and get work done. When people ask me the personal-experience question, my response is that I write from my personal experiences, whether I’ve had them or not. At first, this sounds like a joke and people laugh, but I’m not joking. Regardless of where I got the experience (or the story “idea”), I treat it personally; if it’s not personal, I don’t want to be involved. . . . …

[Read More]