It is the nature of memoir and essay that memory is telling the story and these forms will never be as clean as journalism. In the best literary nonfiction the true rules that need to be followed are artistic ones. Those rules are developed in each individual book by each individual artist, and they should be judged that way, individually, not in a great hue and cry of moralistic oversimplification. Yes, it is wise for writers of memoir to hew as closely as they can to the facts. But my worry is that we will, as usual, overreact and learn too literal of a lesson. That in rushing to rein things in we will choke off what is creative and alive in the form.
Category Archives: Quotes
The Possibility of Failure
Anyway, do we really want consistency in an artist? What does this pressure to please the market have to do with art? Originality involves risk, and risk implies the possibility of failure. That’s how greatness is born.
Everything into Products
I am not saying that it is a bad or dishonest thing to try to sell your work. It is not. What I am saying is that I am tired of the rush to commodify everything, to turn everything into products, including people. I don’t want a brand, because a brand limits me. A brand says I will churn out the same thing over and over. Which I won’t, because I am weird.
Tune Her Out
[E]very time I spoke to my grandmother, she’d issue the same decree. Her voice now represented all of the voices questioning my right to depict China at all, preempting my every sentence, shrouding me in so much self-doubt that, many days, I censored myself. I couldn’t write a word.
In order to write, I needed to tune her out. I needed to remind myself that it’s the duty of novelists to write past polemics, to show complexity and humanity everywhere we look. That the crucial voices were those of my characters[.]
Characters aren’t your friends
I really irks me when people critique a book or a movie on the basis of “unlikeable characters” or characters who take morally questionable or reprehensible actions, which is like saying you didn’t like The Poseidon Adventure because the ship wasn’t seaworthy. When you read a book you’re not supposed to evaluate the characters as people, like you’re deciding whether or not to hire them or be friends with them. Characters aren’t your friends and they don’t have to be role models.
Fragments
The objects don’t tell the whole story though, just as a view through a window doesn’t, or a bookshelf, or any infinite number of Facebook albums– but why are these things so compelling all the same?
I wonder if– outside of fictional realms– such fragments come closer to a kind of truth than anything else can? And I wonder how much of the pleasure lies in making the connections by ourselves.
All work is equally honorable
It may seem perverse that I compare my writing to plumbing, an occupation not regarded as high-end. But to me all work is equally honorable, all crafts an astonishment when they are performed with skill and self-respect. Just as I go to work every day with my tools, which are words, the plumber arrives with his kit of wrenches and washers, and afterward the pipes have been so adroitly fitted together that they don’t leak. I don’t want any of my sentences to leak. The fact that someone can make water come out of a faucet on the 10th floor strikes me as a feat no less remarkable than the construction of a clear declarative sentence.
Disappointed
The longer I procrastinate on returning phone calls and emails, the more guilty I feel about it. The guilt I feel causes me to avoid the issue further, which only leads to more guilt and more procrastination. It gets to the point where I don’t email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me.
—Allie @ Hyperbole and a Half
The Only Way
[F]iction can sometimes be the only way to tell the truth.
Slacker
9:30 P.M. Dread resumption of office job in the morning. Regret all choices and circumstances that have led to necessity of having a day job. Recall A.O. Scott’s hilarious (yet sympathetic) indictment of Generation X in last week’s “Week in Review” piece on Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask. Track it down and reread. Reflect on the ultimate pointlessness of trying to escape the slacker mindset.
9:40 P.M. Begin drinking (bourbon).
The Remainder Table 