Fine, this is what it looks like.

It took me forever to get this review written.  I bought Blue Nights, Joan Didion’s latest work, in November, soon after it came out.  It’s a small book and I figured I could read it in a day and get to work. I started it pretty quickly and read 40 pages.  And then it sat on the night stand by my reading chair in my bedroom.  I took the cover off, and the back photo haunted me every time I saw it—Didion’s daughter, young, sitting on a chair, elbows on knees with towhead in hands, too serious. And I couldn’t read it.  I knew it was about mortality, and as Didion says “When we talk about mortality, we are talking about our children.” I knew her daughter, so ill in the first memoir, was going to die, had died, and so I spent a lot of time not reading it.  And when I went back to Blue Nights in January, I opened my reading journal to see what I’d written, to remind me.

“There’s a sense of clinging about this…it’s humbling and haunting and it makes me want to stop reading it and go read a book or play a game with my kids.”

Read more »

 This past week I watched Miss Representation, a film by Jennifer Seibel Newsom.  It’s a documentary about the portrayal of women in the media and the effect on political and feminist discourse.  Despite people always saying women have come such a long way in the entertainment industry, and in politics, the glass ceiling is a myth, and blah blah blah—forget that, it’s not true.  “The media treats the women like shit,” Margaret Cho says in the film, summing it up nicely.  Cho had a sitcom in the 90s, and she was pressured into losing weight for the show, only to be replaced by The Drew Carey Show, “you know, because he’s so slim,” Cho says, laughing at the absurdity.

Disappointing, MJ.

  It’s really not funny, though. Seibel Newsom frames the movie in a personal way—she has a daughter, and she wants better than a world where female politicians are called Mrs. instead of by their earned title, where Hillary Rodham Clinton’s ankles are more important than her ideas on foreign policy, and where a photo of Michele Bachmann eating a corn dog or making “crazy eyes” is national news.  I want this, too.  I cried, in fact, because my oldest child right now is a little girl who is confident in her intelligence, her kindness, and her equality.  Right now, she believes she is both beautiful and smart, both kind and capable.  I never felt this way as a child, that I can remember, and it feels like one of my biggest successes as a parent that all of my kids seem to.  I fear the time is coming, though, those years when girls turn from confident happy people into virtual strangers who obsess about their looks and appearance, forgetting all that made them proud to be themselves as children.  Read more »

In The Writer’s Chronicle this month I found an article called “The Inner Identity of Immersion Memoir” by Suzanne Farrell Smith.  It’s a good article focused on creating some sort of set of guidelines for the immersion memoir, with some good examples (Andrew Pham’s Catfish and Mandala, Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk, and Lucinda Frank’s My Father’s Secret War, all of which are going on my reading list).  She brings up an interesting point—is there such a thing as genre nonfiction?  Read more »

See? Pretty book.

Our local library recently had a book sale, and I went on the last day, when you could get a bag full for $3.  So my family and I went down and brought our own big bag and we loaded up with 25 books.  The first one I read was Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard.  It’s a short thing, just 75 pages, and I was interested because I found it in the fiction section of the book sale, and I’d not read anything but nonfiction by Dillard, but it turns out this book’s nonfiction.  It’s a lovely little first edition with the pages that are uneven at the edges, and they are thick.  I love it.  My kids already wrote in it, but that’s really neither here nor there.   I love how on Dillard’s website she explains what genre her books are (this one’s a nonfiction narrative).   It’s great because we’re always having to label our writing, and she’s sort of funny and matter-of-fact about it.   I first read Annie Dillard a few years ago, when I was on my first memoir kick.  I read An American Childhood, or at least I read part of it.  I didn’t make it through.  This was before I’d studied writing at all, but even then I knew her sentences were gorgeous, bubbling over with beauty even, but for whatever reason the book didn’t hold my interest.  In graduate school I read an essay called “Total Eclipse,” which then led me to read a beautiful and lyrical book Dillard wrote in 1999, called For the Time Being.  It was a masterful threading of a few different narratives, historical, philosophical, scientific, and ecological, and after reading it, it immediately went on my thesis list, so that I could study it more.

Part of what makes reading Annie Dillard so interesting is that she goes on all these adventures, and we get to go with her. It’s through her own curiousity and endeavoring to put pieces together that we get to see any of this. Read more »

Part 2:  Last week I started to summarize my experience at a teleconference put on by the National Association of Memoir Writers.  The conference’s subject was truth in nonfiction, always a hot topic in the creative nonfiction arena.   This week I’m going to move on to the second conference.  It was called “Memoir:  A Hot Genre in Today’s Marketplace,” though I’m not sure that was the topic, but nonetheless  it flowed really nicely from Dinty W. Moore’s conference on truth in CNF.  He stressed the need that people have to tell their stories:  “It’s good for the world.”  The author on this second teleconference was Jennifer Lauck, author of Blackbird, Found:  A Memoir, two other memoirs, and a bunch of digital craft lesson downloads. 

                In “Why I Write,” Terry Tempest Williams says “I write to the questions that shatter my sleep.”  That seems to be the way Lauck sees things too.  Read more »

So I was on the phone with Dinty Moore yesterday…no, really, I was, and the fact that there were about 30 other people on the phone call does not diminish the aforementioned.  I attended a telesummit put on by the National Association of Memoir Writers, and hosted by its founder and president, Linda Joy Meyers.   Dr. Meyers put together the telesummit, which included five hour-long panels which I was able to access by calling in.  I wasn’t able to call in for all of the five panels, but I did listen in for about half. 

This is how you do a conference call, right?

First up was Dinty W. Moore, who answered questions from Linda and talked about truth in Creative Nonfiction.  It was a good conversation.  He jumped right in to the truthiness of it all, pointing out that fiction and nonfiction writers are both trying to get to some kind of truth, but that writers of nonfiction come to a different kind of truth, a truth arrived at by an unveiling of the self.   And writing nonfiction but calling it fiction, Moore said, is a bad way to write nonfiction.  It blurs the boundary of what you could have discovered if you’d gone ahead and mined your experience rather than changing a few details of it.  I’m not sure about that (Pam Houston comes to mind as a really good writer of autobiographical fiction), but I get his general point—it’s the digging and the honest unveiling, the metaphors you find when you’re writing nonfiction, that make it so compelling.  “It’s good for the world,” Moore said.  “People need to tell their stories.”  It’s universalizing. 

                As for truthiness, when it comes to changing the name of a neighbor or using a composite character or compressing time, Moore believes that though a writer must be honest,  emotional truth is more important than the factuality of each and every detail.  Try your best to tell the truth, but realize it’ll never be perfect, is what I got from what he said.  And I like the way he summed it up:  “I get tired of those arguments…Let the people who buy the books decide.”  Yes.  Read more »

blah blah blah blah

Sometimes, don’t you think you’re an idiot?  Like you somehow have fooled some people into thinking you’re talented?  You probably don’t, but I do, and I’m not the only one.  Mary Karr tells a story in her third memoir, Lit, that I keep thinking about.  She was teaching, I think, and struggling with life junk, and feeling inadequate.  So, clutching a mess of papers and books, about to cry (this is how I pictured the scene when I read it), she squeezes her eyes shut and shouts something like “I’ve never read (insert canonical writer here)!”   Her teaching colleagues follow suit, each hollering out some author they hadn’t studied (but probably always thought they should or would get to it).

So, in the interest of cheering myself up while I search for jobs that don’t require a stupid-specific accrual of experience…let’s hear it.  Who is an author you’ve never read, though people make annoying references to them constantly?  I’ll start.  I have never, ever, ever read anything by Walt Whitman.  I don’t want to, either, because the very words “Leaves of Grass” annoy me.  So I’ll probably never understand what it means to be “Whitmanesque,” and I’m OK with that.  Now you.  Bare your shame!

This week I read a craft book by an author I enjoy, one who writes both fiction and nonfiction, Anne Lamott.  The book’s called Bird by Bird, and though it mentions mostly fiction techniques, it’s remarkably relevant for nonfiction as well.  I’ve talked some about creating a character of yourself, which is what we do in nonfiction. In fact, when I write, I’m supposed to be creating a whole cast of characters—all of them me.  But the different characters I play are important, because just like you have to get to know a fictional character to figure out what they would do next, or how they would order their eggs cooked at a restaurant, I have to step into the character of that moment, the character I’m using to portray this one aspect.  Read more »

Ah, the age-old question: Which came first, the egg, or the lovely white box the egg is placed in?

Over the past couple of years, in the process of earning my MFA, I’ve heard a couple of books mentioned over and over:  one is Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy, and the other Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett.  A friend advised me, when I spoke of my interest in reading both, to read Grealy’s book first.  I took her advice and loved that book so much I immediately added it to my thesis list and studied it.  I was struck by the way Grealy used the writer-at-the-desk (that’s WAD.  It’s going to catch on.)  Her narrator was remarkably consistent at every stage and age, which is a remarkably difficult thing for a writer.  That was a couple of months ago, and this week I finished reading Truth & Beauty.  When I finished, and even throughout, I knew what I thought, but as always I wanted to hear what other people thought about it.  So I went in search of reviews of the book.  And I found plenty, but not the kind I was looking for.  I hoped for a discussion of the craft of memoir and how Patchett went about it, since she writes mostly fiction, and I hear it’s good fiction (I plan to read State of Wondersoon, which I think is her latest novel).  I wanted to know how Patchett approached writing a memoir differently than writing fiction, or if she found it much the same. I wanted to know what other people thought about the memoir and the writing.  Because it got plenty of attention, but again, not for the reasons I would have thought. 

Read more »

Navel-gazing.  Another undeservedly dirty word.  Snooty circles all around the world are throwing this one around, right after “sentimental.”  I think all genres have been accused of narcissism, and creative nonfiction for sure.  Memoir has been branded over and over as a cry for attention:  Look at me!  Look at my crazy life/mom/dad/child/job/whatever.  Navel-gazing isn’t the same thing as exhibitionism, so let’s stop saying it is, shall we?  I think it’s more about introspection; finding something about ourselves and then applying it to the world, or at least to something larger than ourselves.  Or looking at something in an unexpected way, like Hunter S. Thompson in his essay on the Kentucky Derby, in which we see nothing of the Kentucky Derby and a lot of the author and his friend reveling in the depravity they came to record.  Here’s a really great craft essay on navel-gazing which looks at the issue literally and literarily.  Writers are narcissists, and so are readers—as writers we want to capture the human heart under stress (to steal a line from Tim O’Brien), many times our own hearts under stress, and as readers we want to know what’s in it for us, the so what factor and all that.  In fact, I think a person would be hard-pressed to find good writing that doesn’t involve some amount of introspection and application.  So can we all cross navel-gazing off our list of “literary” curse words?  Because if you’re not looking inward at all, I think you’re doing it wrong.