A generous, empathetic writer’s companion.
Encouragement to imagine, write, and revise.
Drawing on decades of teaching, as well as her own writing experiences, Mattison (Bennington Writing Seminars; When We Argued All Night, 2012, etc.) offers a warmhearted guide addressed to those who “not only have the impulse to write stories, but have acted on it repeatedly.” Instead of rules and techniques, she offers personal anecdotes, examples of problems her students have faced, and close readings of a wide range of fiction, all meant to inspire her readers’ imaginations and bolster their efforts. Mattison cautions against self-censorship, often caused by fear of failure, fear of imagining new realities, or assorted other inhibitions: “Writing well involves surprising ourselves, giving what we don’t yet know we care about a chance to emerge.” The central task in writing fiction is “inventing people and actions from nothing, or inventing slight deviations from factual truth.” These inventions come from “what’s most intense in us,” and Mattison counsels writers to fully inhabit their characters to discover their unique personalities. “To whom should this have happened?” she writes, “is a promising question for turning life into fiction.” Writers need also to attend to events, drama, and strong feelings to enliven their plots. Although finished stories have an inevitability that undermines their usefulness as guides, Mattison offers myriad examples from writers including William Maxwell, Doris Lessing, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Rebecca West, Alice Munro, and many others. Tillie Olsen appears not only as an accomplished writer, but as a woman who put aside her fiction to attend to other tasks in her life; George Eliot serves both for her achievements in Middlemarch and as a keeper of a writing journal; and Mark Twain demonstrates the process of revision, as Mattison analyzes three versions of his last book. Rewriting, the author insists, is a crucial task.
A generous, empathetic writer’s companion.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-525-42854-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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