Tag Archives: Nonfiction

21: This I Know

This I Know: Notes on Unraveling the Heart by Susannah Conway

I picked this up at Chapters on Robson while I was birthday present shopping. It was the last copy. It was that kind of day.

I read about this earlier this year when she was doing a blog book tour (I posted the quote that caught my attention here) and I started following her blog. The book interested me because it’s about navigating grief through a creative process.

[W]hen something bad happens that’s big enough to make you question your entire life, all the other hurts that are hanging around, all the wounds you’ve collected in your lifetime, will come out of the shadows and ask to be healed too.

This I Know (xiii)

In 2005, Susannah Conway’s boyfriend of two years died suddenly/unexpectedly from a heart attack. But there’s a parallel story of loss: when she was a child, her father left his family (Susannah, her sister and her mom) and moved to Australia. He wasn’t dead, but he was gone.

As I read This I Know, and the ways she worked through her grief, I couldn’t help thinking about what a difference how you lose someone makes in the grieving process. There’s a purity in grieving someone who has died vs. someone who has left. When someone dies, you get to keep your memories. You can reread the letters. You can look at the photographs. You can remember all the things you did together. These things are yours and no one can take them away.

When someone leaves, you not only lose them, you lose your memories—or rather, your memories are taken from you. All the mementos you thought were the most important inanimate things in your life (the stuff you’d rescue if your house were burning down) are now just reminders that what you once thought was true, you now know was false.

There’s also a difference in how people react to different kinds of grief. You’re not likely to hear someone say “you’re better off without him/her” to someone grieving a death (there are exceptions, I know). Everyone sympathizes/empathizes with the death of a loved one. But when a loved one leaves voluntarily, people just see someone who hurt their friend/family member. But for the person grieving it’s more complicated than that.

I don’t know if this book will resonate with everyone. I think those who share similar characteristics (read: introverted interdisciplinary creatives) will find it inspiring. For example, she writes of the exhaustion of needing to be ‘on’ all the time and writes of the luxury of solitude, the gift of time to herself. For her, being alone was a necessary part of healing. This is something I understand implicitly. (Though I’m not sure others do.)

When I have to my work—myself—out there, I do it with as little fanfare as possible.

This I Know (72)

Which is not to say I agree completely with everything. She does a lot of talking through her grief, whereas that’s something I hesitate to do. A long time ago, I read something about not talking too much about the things you want to write about because if you do, your need to write about them will dissipate and I think that’s true (at least for me). But she is, I think, a photographer first and a writer second. So maybe putting things into words doesn’t carry the same weight as it does for someone who’s primarily a writer. (Further to this point, I will be reading Emily Rapp’s forthcoming memoir The Still Point of the Turning World in 2013. She’s been writing through her grief at Little Seal.)

Susannah channels her grief into a journey of self-discovery that leads her to create her own perfect job for herself (she runs online photography-focused classes). This of course ties in perfectly with my theory that hitting bottom frees you to take risks that you otherwise never would have. This I Know is set up kind of like a workbook. At the end of each chapter there’s a ‘reflection’ with a suggested activity (writing + photography) related to the chapter topic.

One final quote I have to share (because of this and also this):

I once met [an artist] at a party whose words have always stuck with me: “Boyfriends come and go, ” she said, refilling my wine glass, “but my work is always there for me. It’s this rock I have in my life I can always rely on.”

This I Know (156)

An osmotic membrane

There is fact in fiction and fiction in fact. What is commonly viewed as an impermeable barrier is often an osmotic membrane. The difficulty of establishing what is historically true, as in many notorious forgeries, is an intrinsic impediment of the human record.

—Edwin M. Yoder, Jr.

Different

[Nonfiction is] a different muscle, the one where you tell a different version of the truth than you do when writing fiction.

—Roxane Gay

A kind of ethical or spiritual discipline

I think sometimes about writing nonfiction as a kind of ethical or spiritual discipline. The true thing, told plainly, is not always the thing that makes the liveliest story. In real life, the bon mot wasn’t always uttered, the climax didn’t happen in a setting with an objective correlative handy, and the good guy didn’t always triumph. Life resists plot–at least on the surface. To entertain–or to “teach and delight,” in the classical formulation–it’s sometimes simpler to turn to another genre. But if we decide to pursue creative nonfiction, then the truth (our own remembered, subjective truth) functions as do the rhyme and meter requirements of a sonnet. It offers us boundaries, discipline. We are faithful to it. It pressures us into discovering the material’s own form, into making a new thing that is compelling.

—Joy Castro

About the world

I imagine autobiographical writers are writers who write about their own lives and their life stories. There’s a difference to me between your life and your memories. Of course I have memories about my own life, my own family, but a lot of memories I carry with me are about the world. And those are not—I don’t think those can be called—autobiographical. Those are really observations. I remember these things, but you have to make sense of these memories by writing other people’s stories, rather than your own stories.

…

My inclination was not to write nonfiction, but what I got from nonfiction was that I can write nonfiction. Because I hate to write about myself and talk about myself, but I realized there are ways to write nonfiction that’s really not about yourself, but about the world. That makes me very happy.

—Yiyun Li

You don’t really sound smart

The message: You have to write the same way as others in your field. You must use multisyllabic words, complex phrasing, and sentences that go on for days, because that’s how you show you’re smart. If you’re too clear, if your sentences are too simple, your peers won’t take you seriously.

Many people—publishers of scholarly work, editors at higher-education publications, agents looking for academic authors capable of writing trade books—who think about the general quality of scholarly prose would admit that we’re in a sorry state, and most would say there isn’t much to do about it.

…

By writing prose that is nearly unintelligible not just to the general public, but also to graduate students and fellow academics in your discipline, you are not doing the work of advancing knowledge. And, honestly, you don’t really sound smart. I understand that there are ideas that are so difficult that their expression must be complex and dense. But I can tell you, after years of rejecting manuscripts submitted to university presses, most people’s ideas aren’t that brilliant.

—Rachel Toor

Writing about the things that really matter

One of the places you can really see the influence of “Operating Instructions” is in the proliferation of mommy blogs. I wonder if you read any — or if you think, if you were a young and single mom now, you would be blogging?

I don’t think I would have ever blogged. I am not even sure how you find someone’s blog. What I loved were all those years of doing shaped, crafted essays about my life and spiritual or political pursuits — but those 1,200 or whatever words took a full week to get just right. They were the length and the topics I love to read. I always used to tell my writing students to write what they’d love to come upon — and I love deeply honest, authentic writing about the things that really matter in our lives. I asked Sam the other day if people could make money on Twitter or blogging, and he said, not really. Plus, my friend Mary saw a T-shirt at the airport that said, “No one reads your blog.”

What I think is great is everyone writing their truth, keeping a written video of their lives, their families’ lives — growing up, and seeking connection with others in this very jarring and disconnected world. But I don’t think I’m a blogging type — I’m-too much of a perfectionist. I keep trying to capture moments and passages just right, so other people might find a little light to see by in my work. And that takes forever.

—Anne Lamott
in an interview with Sarah Hepola

Those who dwell in the land of ambivalence

Border crossings require resolve. Getting on a plane, getting married, moving, taking a job, writing the first words. Babies cry themselves to sleep resisting the transition from wakefulness to slumber. Throughout my life I’ve kept a classification of the two kinds of people in the world: those who dwell in the land of ambivalence and those who give it a glance and drive on. Those who know where they’re going, and the perpetual rubberneckers.

—Elizabeth Rubin

The blog was process, the book was conclusion

One smart friend who has read both [blog and book] said she thought the blog was process, the book was conclusion. The ideas in the book are presented in a more distilled, thoughtful way, and the book framework allows me to tell longer stories and explain more complicated ideas. I’m able to show how different ideas fit together, which can be tough to do in one blog post. The book goes deeper.

—Gretchen Rubin

Outward towards the world

First, what a personal essay is not: it’s not journalism. It can be about anything … but it is not written on assignment. It comes instead from the writer’s own fund of interests and obsessions, questions to be raised or answered, observations, fantasies, regrets, uncertainties, delight. It evolves from a desire to know or to understand, to make connections. It is often triggered by some sort of experience in the world. It will sometimes lead to research, always to reflection. Above all, it is engaged.

And it’s not a confessional piece. … [A] personal essay needn’t be autobiographical at all except as a kind of autobiography of mind. Memoir is okay, but the expectation is that the memoir is not just a record of dates and events; it’s more like a meditation on a time and place and what their particular conjunction reveals, in retrospect, about the world, human nature, the writer’s own emotional disposition. … So, the self, but the self isn’t all. … [T]he movement of the essay is not so much inward as outward towards the world. The personal is the conduit to something larger or more foreign.

—Rosalynn Tyo