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174 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2001
Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.Gornick goes on to use examples of essays that work for her which just adds to my reading list. She spends a little too much time, in my opinion, dwelling on some of the other writings which is a shame because it took away from her own thesis. I wanted to know what she thought about the craft more than what she thought about other examples, but I understand it can be a funky slope - hard to talk about one without flashing up some examples from which to make one's point.
(p13)
It's the depth of inquiry that guides the personal narrative from essay into memoir.Gornick ends with suggestions for further reading, so here it is for posterity:
(p85)
Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Judith BarringtonFor the most part, a lot of great insights here, but got a little lost in some of her examples and lengthy thoughts on them.
Modern American Memoirs; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley (eds)
I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Patricia Hampl
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Anne Lamott
Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; Jane Taylor McDonnell
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir; William Zinsser (ed)
"I find myself remembering all the people who, all along the way, as I confided one memoir or essay enthusiasm after another, repeatedly called to my attention not only the different kind of essays and memoirs I was ignoring but all that was not addressed what I was reading. True, I readily agreed . . . but secretly believed . . . inner coherence would prevail . . . "
Her words had deepened the atmosphere and penetrated my heart. Why? I wondered even as I brushed away the tears. Why had these words made a difference?
The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.
Every work of literature has bith a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.
We are in the presence, in each instance, of a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows - moving from unearned certainty to thoughtful reconsideration to clarified self-knowledge. The act of clarifying on the page is an intimate part of the metaphor.
Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that, the power of the writing imagination is required.
That this son must come into his own by making war not on a parent who is willful and self-involved (which he is) but on one filled with the tender regard that alone gives a growing creature the ability to declare itself (which he also is). This is the thing the reader is meant to register; this is the narrator's wisdom. It is the betrayal of love that is required in order that one become.
For each of them a flash of insight illuminating the idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the writer's organising principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.
"who is speaking, what is being said, and what is the relation between the two" had become my single-minded practice"
She ends with an observation about timing, the thing that a can rarely predict.Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at a time that we are reading.
This explains why a worthy book might be overly criticized while one of fleeting value is highly praised, the former, great though it may be, misses the mark because what it has to say can not be absorbed at the moment, while the latteris well received because what it is addressing is alive - now, right now - in the shared psyche.Which is perhaps as it should be. The inner life is nourished only if it gets what it needs when it needs it.