Set aside those bulky how-to handbooks for this healthy balm of common-sense wisdom, inspiration, and encouragement.
A master class in fiction writing, taught by a National Book Award winner.
Fans of McDermott’s fiction should flock to this sprightly collection, which demonstrates that the author expects “a lot” from the craft. The first of 14 essays lays it on the line. Drawing on passages from fellow writers Mark Helprin, Philip Roth, and Eudora Welty, among others, McDermott writes that she’s always looking for “solace in art.” In addition, she looks for pain and the sweetness of life; authentic, memorable characters; and well-crafted sentences; but ultimately, “I expect fiction to seek to make sense of life and death—yours, mine, and everybody else’s.” High standards, indeed. McDermott ponders the importance of openings—“how many ways can a story seduce you into reading it”—as well as the necessity of a “hint of magic” and a “surge of joy” and how a satisfying ending casts us back to the beginning. Throughout, she draws on personal stories and numerous quotes from writers she admires. After exploring the nuts and bolts of what makes a good sentence, she delivers a healthy dose of Nabokov. McDermott’s simplest advice for fledging novelists is “for God’s sake, read what you’ve already written” to see how everything connects. She writes about telling a bunch of groaning third graders that “to be a writer was to have homework due for the rest of your life.” When suffering writer’s block, “sometimes nothing short of starting over will do.” In “Faith and Literature,” McDermott explores what it means to be a Catholic writer. Later, she offers a quick piece of priceless advice: “no inanimate object…in a story or a novel is arbitrary.” She tells her students, “Embrace the astonishing reality of a vivid world, a created world, formed only of words on a page. It’s a gift.”
Set aside those bulky how-to handbooks for this healthy balm of common-sense wisdom, inspiration, and encouragement.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-374-13062-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
A thoughtful meditation on a celebrated poet’s reasons for writing.
The former U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner reflects on how geography and history shaped her creative career.
Trethewey’s earliest memories take place inside her grandmother’s “shotgun house” outside of Gulfport, Mississippi. Later, the author would learn that her birthplace was located on Highway 49, “a legendary highway of the Blues,” and that her birthday was on “the hundredth anniversary of Confederate Memorial Day.” These literal and metaphorical intersections deeply influenced Trethewey’s life by inspiring her to study her grandmother’s Black vernacular (“the language that connected us across time and space”), her awareness of the ways in which America systematically erases Black history and culture, and her obsession with permanently inscribing her mother’s existence—and her untimely death—into the historical record. “To have dominion over oneself, to be the sovereign of the nation of self, one must be the writer of the story,” she writes. By the end of this brief text, part of the publisher’s Why I Write series, Trethewey concludes that for her, “the language of poetry creates a space for what I’ve lost to carry on, a momentary stay against the inevitable.” It is this recovery of losses—e.g., family memories of the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross across the street from her grandmother’s house, the contributions of Black soldiers to the Union’s victory in the Civil War, the upkeep of her mother’s gravesite—that has driven the author’s storied career for decades. In this lyrical, thoughtful volume, Trethewey not only makes surprising, insightful connections between personal and national history; she also paints a profound portrait of unresolvable grief. Though it adheres to the series format, the text feels like a long-form essay. While a satisfying read, many of the narrative’s nuanced but neat conclusions could merit more exploration.
A thoughtful meditation on a celebrated poet’s reasons for writing.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780300265927
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A somber meta-memoir, rich in ideas but set at an emotional low boil.
The experimental novelist wrestles with mortality, identity, parenthood, and friendship—and that’s before the pandemic hits.
This contemplative, rhetorically austere memoir is a kind of companion piece to Zambreno’s excellent 2020 novel, Drifts. That work of autofiction followed the author as she labored to meet a book deadline while navigating teaching gigs, her creative direction, and parenthood. Same story here: Zambreno has been commissioned to write a study of the French writer Hervé Guibert, whose 1990 novel, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, was a roman à clef about his friendship with philosopher Michel Foucault. The novel was controversial (and became a French bestseller) for disclosing that Foucault died of AIDS. Though Zambreno tries to stay on point, Guibert’s book mainly serves as a launchpad for more personal excursions she can’t set aside. Much of the first half of this book is focused on a friendship with a writer who wished to keep her identity obscure. Was their connection more authentic for being anonymous, Zambreno wonders, or a more distant connection of two artistic personas? In the second half, Zambreno focuses on life as a new mother consumed with thoughts about intimacy, relationships, and (of course) finishing the Guibert book. As the pandemic grew in scope, Zambreno’s sense of disillusionment and despair intensified, feelings she finds echoed in Guibert’s work. Drifts was digressive but possessed a lyricism, sense of humor, and passion that justified its fragmentary nature. By contrast, this book is meandering and chilly. Zambreno clings to Guibert’s book as a signifier of troubled friendships, first-person writing, and physical illness, but there’s little sense of resolution or coherence. That’s partly the point, of course. The author is frustrated by the way memoir is “supposed to be incredibly earnest and moral.” She wants to push back against that tradition, but the result is more an exercise in sangfroid than transgression.
A somber meta-memoir, rich in ideas but set at an emotional low boil.Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-231-18845-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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