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That old fly on the wall
“Dialogue for me is the most effective and most interesting way of defining character, making it unnecessary for the writer to intrude with any song-and-dance routine of his own,” explains literary...
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One writing teacher’s plight
A short story writer, essayist, novelist, memoirist, editor, and writing workshop leader, Paulette Bates Alden has an impressive blog and web site. Her wise essays on writing technique and aspects of...
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The leverage of persona in memoir
Childhood tales by Jeannette Walls, Harry Crews & Annie Dillard Joining millions of others, I’ve now read Jeannette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle. Walls wins the prize for modern memoir’s most...
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Reading ‘Gatsby’ as memoir
The power of the reflective narrator in novels & memoirs The Great Gatsby is a touchstone book for me, as it is for many writers, so as I tried to rework my memoir’s prologue recently it was my...
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There’s something about memoir
. . . and what writers rarely admit about rejection & revision I have a lot of friends who are fiction writers, and they all told me that writing a memoir is different—and hard.—Darin Strauss, in...
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Richard Ford’s novel ‘Canada’
A retrospective narrator gives Ford’s fiction the feel of memoir. Canada by Richard Ford. HarperCollins, 420 pp. . . . “Canada” is blessed with two essential strengths in equal measure — a mesmerizing...
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Memoirist, skin thy own cat
Salman Rushdie on the novel’s debt to memoir, memoir’s debt to New Journalism—and why the novel is harder than either. The foment over Salman Rushdie’s new memoir led me in a roundabout way to...
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Truth and beauty redux
Nonfiction faces challenges in writing from another’s point of view; but do the genre’s constraints limit its claims to art? A version of the post below first appeared January 20, 2009. I was thinking...
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Those best books lists . . .
Strayed’s Wild my top memoir; Ford’s Canada my top novel. I’m on track to have read some sixty-seven books in 2012. I know that because for the first time I kept a reading log, which is heavily...
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Noted: Gutkind on nonfiction’s truth
Does the nature of narrative complicate his 1-2-3 recipe? The subject is there only by the grace of the author’s language. —Joyce Carol Oates Immersion journalist and nonfiction theorist Lee Gutkind...
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