Memoirist or monster? What gives writers the right? When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.—Czeslaw Milosz We all know that view. Talking last week to a friend about Emily Rapp’s Poster Child memoir, reviewed here, my friend mentioned Rapp’s forthcoming memoir about her disabled son who is dying, or possibly already dead, from Tay-Sachs disease. “I can’t imagine doing that,” she said. “I think I’d have other things on my mind.” I looked at her, …
My “Wild Ducks,” a braided memoir, appears in River Teeth. The past few years, working on my memoir of farming in Appalachia, I’ve generated tons of material—twice, 500 pages—and have spun some passages into stand-alone pieces. The published ones include an essay on my hired hand who died; another about a legendary pond-builder with a tragic secret; one about the historic first meeting of my future wife and my father; yet another about my father’s return to farming in retirement …
Another nonfiction issue: judging a book by its author? I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.—William Gass As my previous three posts indicate, I admire Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. I devoured it as a reader and also loved how I could raid her techniques for my own memoir. So …
How Cheryl Strayed feathers her compelling backstory into Wild. . . . I spun the backstory. I dole it out. The trail is a chronological report of my hike; what came before the trail is not chronological. I give you a scene from when I was seven and then another the year before [the hike]. I worked that pretty hard.—Cheryl Strayed in an interview The second time through Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, …
Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything. —Jonah Lehrer* After my next post, on Dinty W. Moore’s new book The Mindful Writer, this blog is apt to fall totally silent for a few weeks. On Tuesday I’m flying with my wife and daughter to London, where we’ll meet up with our son who has been living in …
So is there no fact, no event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean? Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party, town and country, nation and world, must …
My standards are so low. I don’t feel like I am . . . protecting writing from amateurs or dabblers or those who are simply no good. My students have expressed a profound interest in writing. I let them write what they want to write.—Michael Martone, linked below Marissa, who blogs at Paucis Verbis, has named Narrative [this blog’s first name] one of her top five favorite blogs of 2012 (already!). I am pleased and grateful to her for this notice …