Richard Russo on his new memoir, Elsewhere. For some reason, I put in a standing order a long time ago for Richard Russo’s Elsewhere: A Memoir, and now here it sits on my coffee table, a book, it turns out, about his close but conflicted relationship with his mother. Maybe I was eager because I enjoyed Empire Falls, or maybe I was curious at the time about what an acclaimed novelist would do in his first work of nonfiction. Anyway, …
Based on this post, I got and am almost through the novel and have to agree. It is rather amazing lyrical writing and conveys what loss in war, combat, and PTSD must really be like. There may not be a surfeit of plot but in the open spaces the reader’s own imagination works. One can see Hemingway’s influence, positively, but it’s no imitation—Richard Gilbert
The Rose Metal Press Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction: Advice and Essential Exercises from Respected Writers, Editors, and Teachers edited by Dinty W. Moore. Rose Metal Press, 179 pp. They furnished off an apartment with a two-room Roebuck sale The coolerator was crammed with TV dinners and ginger ale But when Pierre found work the little money coming worked out well C’est la vie, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell —Chuck Berry, “You Never …
Salman Rushdie on the novel’s debt to memoir, memoir’s debt to New Journalism—and why the novel is harder than either. The foment over Salman Rushdie’s new memoir led me in a roundabout way to interviews with him on YouTube. One of the best is the long talk above, recorded at Emory University, when he was in the midst of writing Joseph Anton—apparently he wrote some of it there—because he drills into memoir’s granular issues. I got the sense in this …
A retrospective narrator gives a masterful novel the feel of memoir. Canada by Richard Ford. HarperCollins, 420 pp. . . . “Canada” is blessed with two essential strengths in equal measure — a mesmerizing story driven by authentic and fully realized characters, and a prose style so accomplished it is tempting to read each sentence two or three times before being pulled to the next.—Andre Dubus III in his Times review I’m reading two memoirs now, one an immersion and the other …
Guest Post by Janice Gary While reading the latest issue of The New Yorker, I came across “The Hunger Diaries,” excerpted entries (March-June, 1952) from the journal of novelist and short story writer Mavis Gallant. From the very first sentence, the writing captivated me, plunging me into a world both exotic and maddeningly boring, a life narrated in cinematic detail by an unforgettable voice. An armed guard in gray, a church, a wild rocky coast which rushes a steel sea… …
There are people who could never commit murder. I am not one of those people. —Jeanette Winterson Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson Grove Press, 230 pp. Novelist Jeanette Winterson’s searing memoir about life with her depressive mother in working-class England breaks the rules that American memoirists live by. By the rules I mean our emphasis on scene. I won’t bash scene—it’s vital for really conveying one’s experience—and usually scene is deepened and balanced with …