memoir, biography

Craft, self & rolling resistance

June 14, 2010 | 6 Comments

“Writing is not a bundle of skills. Although it is true that an ordinary intellectual activity like writing must lead to skills, and skills inevitably mark the performance, the activity does not come from the skills, nor does it consist of using them.”—Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose by Mark Turner and Francis-Noel Thomas For such an intense period in the past four years of crafting a memoir have I written, rewritten, pondered, read books, cut, restructured, taken …

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‘Reality Hunger’ redux

June 9, 2010 | 3 Comments

Lincoln Michael at The Rumpus has written one of the most interesting and compelling responses to Reality Hunger, by David Shields, that I’ve come across. And that includes my three blog posts stimulated by the “manifesto.” Michael writes: [W]hile Shields praises the same qualities I look for in my art, the book is framed by a somewhat incoherent thesis that fiction is dead, narrative is pointless and the premier literary form of the now is the lyric essay (with memoir, …

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Offutt’s guide to literary terms

April 25, 2010 | 3 Comments

“nonfiction: Prose that is factual, except for newspapers. “creative nonfiction: Prose that is true, except in the case of memoir. “memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges. “novel: A quaint, longer form that fell out of fashion with the advent of the memoir. “short story: An essay written to conceal the …

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Honesty in memoir, ver. 3.2

April 17, 2010 | 6 Comments

John D’Agata’s new book About a Mountain portrays Congress deciding to make Yucca mountain a nuclear dump, and, as if in response, a sixteen-year-old boy makes a suicide leap off the balcony of a skeevy Las Vegas hotel. In an otherwise rave review last February in The New York Times Book Review, Charles Bock took D’Agata to task for changing the date of the boy’s death to better serve his narrative (D’Agata gave the correct date in a footnote). D’Agata …

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Honesty in memoir, ver. 3.1

April 12, 2010 | No Comments

Vivian Gornick’s view of literary memoir as a return to storytelling in her influential treatise The Situation and the Story. After reading David Shields’s anti-narrative yawp Reality Hunger, I happened to be rereading Vivian Gornick’s influential treatise on nonfiction, The Situation and the Story, and saw that she holds a far different view of the reason for the memoir explosion of our time—and she holds as well a different prescription: not more voice, the talking heads Shields loves, but more of …

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Honesty in memoir, ver. 3.0

April 7, 2010 | 6 Comments

The etymology of fiction is from fingere (participle fictum), meaning “to shape, fashion, form, or mold.” Any verbal account is a fashioning or shaping of events. Remembering and fiction-making are virtually indistinguishable. The memoir rightly belongs to the imaginative world, and once writers and readers make their peace with this, there will be less argument over questions regarding the memoir’s relation to the “facts” and “truth.” —David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto A year ago I aired David Shields’s original …

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Review: ‘Name All the Animals’

March 28, 2010 | 6 Comments

Name All the Animals: A Memoir by Alison Smith. Scribner. 319 pages. In 1984, a small, happy family lives in Rochester, New York: a resolute, devout mother; a dreamy, spiritual father; a quiet, competent boy; a watchful, bookish girl. But they’re on the brink of disaster, and, almost immediately, it happens: one day in late July the boy, eighteen, dies in a fiery automobile crash. Nothing will ever be the same. They become secretive, walled off their separate grieving, as …

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