memoir, biography

Augusten Burroughs’ advice book

September 24, 2013 | 16 Comments

This is How: Surviving What You Think You Can’t by Augusten Burroughs. Picador, 230 pp.

This book exists only because Augusten Burroughs has published bestsellers. Any expert in memoir or self-help—or book publishing—would have put the kibosh on it from you or from me. With one word: Don’t.

Yes, it seems like a natural pairing, self-help and memoir. That’s why others have thought of it—and been beaten all the way back to Dubuque by agents. But here are the category codes right on the back cover of Burroughs’s This is How: Self-Help / Memoir.

It does have a personal aspect, in that he tells stories from his life, and it does merit shelving in the self-help genre. But it’s actually advice. Wise, hard-earned advice from a smart guy who’s suffered—having had the most epically dysfunctional and lavishly documented childhood in history—and some of the writing is mesmerizing.

Like the story he tells about a friend. This guy was smart, funny, tremendously appealing. Yet he had no partner—for all his friends, he was very much alone. Turns out, after you knew him a while, he told his Story. He’d been grotesquely abused in childhood by his parents. Once he revealed this, his inner reality he’d been waiting to lay on you, it became a third wheel. And it derailed any relationship.

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My ancient essay surfaces

September 8, 2013 | 11 Comments

“As I look at it, you might as well ask, Does a sunset pay? In a certain sense, it is a sort of profanation to consider if my garden pays, or to set a money value upon my delight in it. Shall I set a price upon the tender asparagus or the crisp lettuce, which made the sweet spring a reality?”—Charles Dudley Warner, My Summer in a Garden

While editor of The Hartford Courant in 1870, author and essayist Charles Dudley Warner had the cunning idea—far ahead of its time, a concept memoir—to spend that growing season gardening. Not for vegetables but for joy. He prosecuted a thesis that gardeners are dreamers engaged in a spiritual activity. As he wrote, 143 years ago now, “To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch their renewal of life,—this is the commonest delight of the race. To dig in the mellow soil—to dig moderately, for all pleasure should be taken sparingly—is a great thing.”

I used his words as a springboard into an essay, “Gardening and Being,” for the summer 1994 issue of Orion. I explained how gardening had grounded me as a person, how its lessons and discipline had been my true crop. The short piece, 1,079 words, was my first personal essay in a slick national magazine. It also marked the seventh anniversary of my and my wife’s purchase of a featureless rectangle of land, an Indiana soybean field, that we’d transformed. By then our white faux colonial farmhouse overlooked our pond, a shimmering blue acre of water, and was embraced by greenery—hundreds of trees and shrubs, gardens of vegetables, perennial flowers. As if endorsing our efforts, the city had built a state-of-the-art elementary on our road, just in time for our daughter and son to start school.

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Time to kill your manuscript?

September 3, 2013 | 15 Comments

There’s a paradox in book-writing. While it’s a true feat just to finish the draft of a book, few rookies and no civilians have a clue how hard it is to make that draft publishable. Yet even when the manuscript is ready, some of the would-be author’s advisors, usually fellow writers—not to mention those he’s pitching, the editors, agents, publishers—will still hate it. Or just be uninterested because it doesn’t do what they need or what they would’ve done. Once technique is under control, which of course is another matter of opinion, loving or hating a book comes down to taste or to preference or to market. Sometimes to character, on both sides of the equation: the writer’s and the reader’s.

And once in a while, because there are so very many ways to go wrong, the writer himself decides to put his manuscript out of its misery, to file it in the darkness under his bed. I’ve heard it said you’re not a true writer until you do that. Give up. Admit defeat. Start something else.

That’s what Dinty W. Moore did with a book he worked on for five years, according to his fascinating essay in a new book, Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, edited by Joy Castro (University of Nebraska Press, 224 pp.). I’ve heard Moore refer to this lost project, or read his references to it, and have always planned to ask him some day what happened. What was the problem he couldn’t solve? He wasn’t a rookie, having published a book of short stories and two nonfiction books, including his very successful The Accidental Buddhist.

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‘Works Cited,’ a stealth memoir

August 27, 2013 | 12 Comments

My summer’s most happy reading surprise was Works Cited, a well-written memoir with a structure both clever and pleasing. Brandon Schrand hit upon the idea to tell his coming-of-age story by listing alphabetically the authors he was reading as he came to manhood, from high school through graduate school. You know, like an MLA Works Cited list. What might have been a story too mundane or too urgent with authorial desire to move us emotionally becomes, instead, a truly affecting stealth memoir by a guy who knows he escaped his fate by the skin of his teeth.

All you really need to know about Schrand, who grew up in the working-class sticks in Idaho, is that his stoner-electrician father’s nickname for him was “Bird-Turd.” He was a goofy kid, a heavy metal punk, and an awful student. But he had one great asset that saved him: he was a reader. Although he blew off assigned books, even in college, from which he dropped out and had to fight his way back, he kept finding great books and reading them. His priorities were often wrong, but they were pure.

Here he is, having blown his last $10 on a collection of Hemingway’s short stories:

“Who was that young man in that coffee shop that afternoon, and what was he feeling? A strange creature, lean and quiet, he is apologetic in his countenance. It’s a tricky business cracking open our younger selves for a peek inside, especially in vulnerable moments . . . There I sat, broke, with a copy of Hemingway’s stories. The college flunky. The dropout. It’s a wonder I bought the book at all. It’s a wonder I took the time to read it. It’s a wonder how I fell into those pages. But I did. First in that coffee shop, and then in the days and weeks and months and years that came afterward.”

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In praise of reading

August 19, 2013 | 9 Comments

Novelist Anakana Schofield’s essay in The Guardian starts with a lament about reporters’ fixation on writers as personalities and about the odd hustling landscape in which writers now dwell—

“These days, an author, especially an unknown author, must—in order to entice any readers to her work who aren’t blood relatives—write endless unpaid blogs, articles and responses for newspapers and magazines and random people creating things in basements. What results is the subsidising of publishers by outsourcing the marketing of the book to the writer, and now and again the subsidising of often giant media corporations, who in times gone by would have had to pay her.”

—and builds to a powerful statement about the primacy of reading:

“There seems to have been a shift from a reading culture to a writing culture, a diminishment of critical space for the contemplation of literature. Writing needs to be discussed and interrogated through reading. If you wish to write well, you need to read well, or at least widely. You certainly need to contemplate reading a book in translation, unlikely to be widely reviewed in newspapers, many of which are too busy wasting space on “how to write” tips and asking about an author’s personal fripperies. It’s a great deal more fulfilling to read and think about a fine book than to attempt to write one.”

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Solnit’s ‘Faraway Nearby’

August 8, 2013 | 13 Comments

Rebecca Solnit tried to leave home at fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. At last, at age seventeen, her jealous mother and her indifferent father sent her into the world like a girl in a fairy tale:

“For that odyssey my mother would not let me take any of the decent suitcases in her attic but gave me a huge broken one in which my few clothes and books rumbled like dice in a cup. My father gave me a broken travel clock that he said was worth repairing and I kept it for years before I found that it was not.”

The Faraway Nearby opens with 100 pounds of apricots, collected from her ailing mother’s tree, ripening and rotting on Solnit’s floor, a bequest and a burden as if from another fairy tale. The fruit was a story, she explains, and also “an invitation to examine the business of making and changing stories.” So Solnit tells her own story, shows how she escaped it by entering the wider world of others’ stories, and how she changed her story as she better understood her unhappy mother.

What sent her mother’s indifference toward her into permanent rage was when she asked young Rebecca, age 13, for sympathy when she got a lump in her breast, and Rebecca, who hadn’t received much sympathy herself, failed to supply it. With effort, as an adult Solnit realizes that her mother had had a hard life, was trapped in her own story of victimhood, and must’ve cared for her before memory: “She gave me everything before she gave me nothing.”

Out of duty and from solidarity with two of her brothers, Solnit ends up tending her mother through her long decline from Alzheimer’s. The apricots arrive near the end of this sad period, which Solnit terms a serial emergency. Having hooked us with this, her story, Solnit tells us it doesn’t much interest her anymore.

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Ray Bradbury: “Style is truth”

August 3, 2013 | 6 Comments

I’m on the road as I post this, headed for Berkeley, California, where our son is entering graduate school; one of my sisters just moved across the way, to San Francisco. My wife and I are driving cross country from Ohio. An adventure! We’ve stopped for the night in Miami, Oklahoma, which is hot and crowded with casinos. I feel at home, though, because the folks are friendly and because my Mom was from Oklahoma. This afternoon in central Missouri I knew we were getting into the West because when we stopped in the backwater of Buffalo for a soda, I noticed in the McDonald’s a row of stools had real leather kids’ saddles for seats.

We reserved a modest vehicle for this trip, but the guy at the rental company said we’d probably be uncomfortable crossing the desert and might have difficulty getting over the mountains. In fact, he implied, we might die. So we rented, for only $20 more a day, a huge (to us) Lincoln Navigator. It is black, and terrifying. We feel like real Americans at last. But will we be safe in San Francisco ensconced in such an SUV? We look like Secret Service, or drug dealers. Or both.

I’m working on a book review on the road, and meantime here is a summer roundup of stuff I’ve found interesting.

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