memoir, biography

Review: Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory’

September 14, 2010 | 11 Comments

Literary artistry and a chilly persona imbue this classic memoir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov. Knopf, 268 pages. “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.” Vladimir Nabokov follows this intriguing precept, which he announces in Speak, Memory, with vigor in the book, fondling the minute sensory and surface …

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‘Saddest Music Ever Written’

September 4, 2010 | 7 Comments

Review: Thomas Larson’s hybrid narrative on a classic composition. The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” by Thomas Larson. Pegasus Books. 262 pages It’s the soundtrack at the climax of Oliver Stone’s Platoon, and was played in countless memorial services for the victims of 9/11. You may not know the title or its composer, but you know—everyone on this planet knows—the pensive, foreboding tune: those ever-rising violins as if a spirit is ascending, the …

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Any memoirist’s dilemma

August 31, 2010 | 10 Comments

“A fundamental dilemma for autobiographical essayists is how exactly to navigate between the necessity to write and the sinking realization that it may not really matter to anyone else. All writers, all artists, deal with this problem, of course, especially at this point in time, when via the blogosphere and social media literally millions of autobiographical missives are launched weekly, each voice clamoring for an audience of careful, sympathetic readers.” I can really relate to this quote from Joe Bonomo’s …

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Lessons from writing my memoir . . .

August 22, 2010 | 17 Comments

Five years ago I began writing a memoir about my experiences farming in Appalachian Ohio. My official start was September 1, as I recall, but I was gearing up at this time of year, in late August, when the common Midwestern wildflowers are blooming. Right now, you can see flowering together in fertile meadows and damp unkempt roadsides: purple ironweed, saffron goldenrod, yellow daisies, and, above it all, the airy mauve bursts of Joe Pye weed. Shade trees look dusty …

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Noted: Tobias Wolff

August 16, 2010 | 2 Comments

“Only at the end of the day, reading over what I’d done, working through it with a with a green pencil, did I see how far I was from where I wanted to be. In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was pleasure in having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it …

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Q&A: Tom Grimes on ‘Mentor’ memoir, 3-act structure & language as bedrock

August 11, 2010 | 5 Comments

From now on, anyone who dreams of becoming a novelist will need to read Tom Grimes’s brutally honest and wonderful “Mentor.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World I might say the same for memoirists in regard to Mentor: A Memoir. This celebrated new book is the story of Tom Grimes’s life and work as a novelist and his relationship with the legendary Frank Conroy (1936–2005), whose books include the classic memoir Stop-Time and the novel Body & Soul, about a young …

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‘The Art of Time in Memoir’

July 26, 2010 | 8 Comments

Sven Birkerts views “double vantage point” as genre’s signature. Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.—Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkerts. Graywolf. 194 pages What’s the difference between a novel and a memoir? The question isn’t as dumb as it may appear. A novel can be autobiographical, drawn completely from life remembered; a memoir is of course made of memory …

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