honesty

Honesty and chronology, part one

September 6, 2009 | 2 Comments

Truth is a disputatious concept in memoir. I’ve said that nonfiction shouldn’t involve invented characters or scenes, unless the author cues the reader to such imaginings, because readers understand the implicit promise in the genre to abjure sleight of hand. But “memory has its own story to tell,” Tobias Wolff argues in introducing This Boy’s Life, meaning that the subjective memories of which memoir is made are the truth. And memories are tumbled in our minds into creative reconstructions to …

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The abomination of faked memoir

July 5, 2009 | One Comment

from “Fiction, Fact, and Faked Memoirs,” by Thomas Larson, author of The Memoir and the Memoirist, in New English Review “Writing a memoir, one is tormented less by the particular truth of a character’s emotion, as in fiction, and more by the emotional truth of one’s own experience. Both ‘emotional truths’ are valid; both fictionist and nonfictionist are after a similar truth—fully fleshing out the authenticity of the emotion. But now the integrity of the memoirist figures in. He must …

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Narrative Newsweek?

June 13, 2009 | 7 Comments

The newsmagazines’ having-it-both-ways blend of newspaper-style objective conventions and jarring rabbit-punch opinions in their news columns always made me queasy. As a friend said, “I feel like I need to take a shower after reading Time or Newsweek.” But I was a Newsweek man, and hung in there through frequent redesigns. Alarmed at first , I soon accepted the new layout and features because I valued the in-depth and reflective coverage, the trend stories, and some of the columnists. Now …

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Digging deeper

June 7, 2009 | No Comments

from the website of Sandra Scofield a novelist and author of Occasions of Sin: A Memoir “[I]n memoir you’re stuck with a story your history gives you. You don’t have the license to invent in the old, fictional way: you can’t leap to making up things to fill the holes or change the shape of an event. You don’t alter chronology to make a dramatic arc tighter. At least I don’t think you do. What you do instead is dig …

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The art of listening

May 1, 2009 | No Comments

The Irish actor Gabriel Byrne was interviewed by Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air about his portrayal of a psychotherapist on the HBO series In Treatment. The show has captured fans because of the inherent drama of diverse characters being guided to insights by a gifted, if flawed, therapist who is a world-class listener, observer, and interviewer. You can listen to the interview about listening here. “We hear sometimes but we don’t often really listen. Really truly profoundly listening is …

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Review: Griffith’s ‘A Good War’

April 28, 2009 | 2 Comments

A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America by David Griffith. Soft Skull Press. 189 pages. When Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done? And they cried out all the more exceedingly, Crucify him.—Mark 15:14 What America learned from World War II, after a billion people died and half the Earth was scorched, was to outlaw war on civilians (which works but at bestial cost) and to ban torture (because it’s ineffective, …

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Lee Gutkind on immersion journalism

April 23, 2009 | One Comment

From an interview with nonfiction guru Gutkind conducted by Eric Parker for Fresno Famous— “[I]mmersions are so wonderful in that you walk into an immersion having an idea, idea A, but by the time you’ve spent three months or six months, you have a new idea, or a different formulation of your idea. Then, if you spend another year or two, your idea sophisticates and focuses even more. So, it’s a constant balancing challenge to make sure that you are …

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