memoir, biography

Q&A: a memoirist’s decade of discovery

December 3, 2011 | 2 Comments

Nina Hamberg, whose award-winning book Grip: A Memoir of Fierce Attractions I recently excerpted, answered questions about her motives and process. In the manner of Tobias Wolff’s great memoirs, Grip’s meaning is embedded in its story. A narrative of Hamberg’s fraught relationships with men who are afflicted with their own baggage, Grip is frank sexually without being overly graphic or salacious. Why did you write Grip? I’d never planned on writing memoir. I thought I had a novel in me, …

[Read More]

Nina Hamberg’s memoir ‘Grip’

November 20, 2011 | 2 Comments

After being assaulted in her own bedroom by a masked intruder when she was a teen, Hamberg found her relationships with men complicated, to say the least. In this thoughtful memoir, she shares the victories and defeats that shaped those relationships in vivid detail. Introspective without lapsing into solipsism . . .Soundly edited, focused and well-crafted, Hamburg’s memoir is an examination of what it means to be a strong, independent woman, and how we often manage to lead ourselves astray …

[Read More]

4 writers on their messy process

October 4, 2011 | 8 Comments

Bill Roorbach has instituted a new feature over at Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, an author interview. The first, with John J. Clayton, marking the appearance of his new novel, Mitzvah Man, is remarkable for being done all in scene—Bill interviewed him at his home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts—and for Clayton’s thoughts on just what God truly is. Or may be. On his laborious daily struggle to write:  I do what I can to avoid writing fiction, because writing fiction is …

[Read More]

Welty on what’s ‘greater than scene’

September 6, 2011 | 5 Comments

A version of this post first appeared on August 31, 2008. Eudora Welty’s essay “The Little Store” takes us with her, as a child, to a neighborhood grocery, what we’d call a convenience store today. It’s a story about the lost world of childhood and it captures turn-of-the-century Jackson, Mississippi. All she conveys is suffused with meaning for her, but Welty avoids sentimentality by showing  instead of telling readers what to feel. The store’s realm is one of children on …

[Read More]

Gail Caldwell 3: more to admire

August 22, 2011 | 8 Comments

I. The way, as I said, that Gail Caldwell employs metaphor in Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship is remarkable. Almost every page includes one. “No, you’re not,” said Caroline, her face as deadpan as a coach’s in a losing season. “No, you’re not. Keep your hands together. Stay still—don’t look at the water, look at your hands. Now look at me.” The voice consoled and instructed long enough for me to straighten into position, and …

[Read More]

Mary Gordon’s master class in the soul

August 16, 2011 | 3 Comments

Guest post by Olga Khotiashova Why do people write memoirs: to share their most exciting experiences with readers or to get rid of haunting ghosts? The truth probably lies somewhere in between these two poles. The magic of a memoir is that any experience, when articulated, loses its privacy, becomes distinct from the author, so the moments of sheer joy, although not so dazzling as before, rest peacefully in a safe place together with unspeakably painful experiences which, on the …

[Read More]

More metaphors & Gail Caldwell

August 11, 2011 | 5 Comments

Still thinking about Gail Caldwell’s deft metaphors in Let’s Take the Long Way Home, I was struck by these remarkable lines by John Steinbeck from The Grapes of Wrath:  Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can’t. The willow tree is you. The pain on the mattress there—that dreadful pain—that’s you. I sure didn’t remember that passage, and it makes me want to reread the novel, which also has—I do remember this—an amazing scene of several pages …

[Read More]