mjsteimle's review against another edition
I was inspired by Ann Lamott's Bird by Bird to learn more about personal essay. I was hoping that this book would also give me some insight into how I can improve my writing, but I was disappointed. Gornick basically quotes a lot of her favorite essayists. I didn't feel like I was learning anything, and it really wasn't very interesting. I put this book aside, but it's short so I intended to come back to it. However, it's due back to the library today and I don't feel any urge to renew, so it will remain unfinished.
andforgotten's review against another edition
4.0
Such an insightful intelligent book; it felt like reading something academic for university, but the style is so enjoyable it reads very pleasantly. I loved the fact that Gornick includes large passages from essays and memoirs to analyse, which has given me a better understanding of the genres as well as a new interest in them.
ralovesbooks's review against another edition
5.0
This book was very helpful to me in understanding the difference between essay and memoir (not just length), as well as acclimating me to the concept of personal narrative as a genre. I'm grateful for the recommendation of this book and would like to have a copy for myself for reference.
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... in fact, without detachment there can be no story; description and response, yes, but no story. (12)
Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional insight, the experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say. (13)
It took [J.R.] Ackerley thirty years to clarify the voice that could tell his story -- thirty years to gain detachment, make an honest man of himself, become a trustworthy narrator. The years are etched in the writing. (20, referring to My Father and Myself)
...the writer was possessed of an insight that organized the writing, and in each case a persona had been created to serve the insight. (23)
...it wasn't their [?] voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae. By which I mean that organic wholeness of being in a narrator the reader experiences as reliable; the one we can trust will take us on a journey, make the piece arrive, bring us out into a clearing where the sense of things is larger than it was before. (24)
"He and I" is an essay rather than a memoir because the writer is using her persona to explore a subject other than herself: in this case, marriage. If it had been a memoir, the focus would have been reversed. (77)
But a memoir is neither testament nor fable nor analytic transcription. A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of a writing imagination is required. As V.S. Pritchett once said of the genre, "It's all in the art. You get no credit for living."
Book recommendation: Clear and Simple as the Truth (162)
How does the writer of personal narrative pull from his or her own boring, agitated self the truth speaker who will tell the story that needs to be told? (165)
--
... in fact, without detachment there can be no story; description and response, yes, but no story. (12)
Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional insight, the experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say. (13)
It took [J.R.] Ackerley thirty years to clarify the voice that could tell his story -- thirty years to gain detachment, make an honest man of himself, become a trustworthy narrator. The years are etched in the writing. (20, referring to My Father and Myself)
...the writer was possessed of an insight that organized the writing, and in each case a persona had been created to serve the insight. (23)
...it wasn't their [?] voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae. By which I mean that organic wholeness of being in a narrator the reader experiences as reliable; the one we can trust will take us on a journey, make the piece arrive, bring us out into a clearing where the sense of things is larger than it was before. (24)
"He and I" is an essay rather than a memoir because the writer is using her persona to explore a subject other than herself: in this case, marriage. If it had been a memoir, the focus would have been reversed. (77)
But a memoir is neither testament nor fable nor analytic transcription. A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that the power of a writing imagination is required. As V.S. Pritchett once said of the genre, "It's all in the art. You get no credit for living."
Book recommendation: Clear and Simple as the Truth (162)
How does the writer of personal narrative pull from his or her own boring, agitated self the truth speaker who will tell the story that needs to be told? (165)
kjboldon's review against another edition
4.0
Gornick's sharp take on memoir, and her insightful close readings are instructive, but she is perhaps a bit TOO insistent on her own truths as absolute.
spiralbound89's review against another edition
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
5.0
Love this guide to understanding personal narrative.
genrichards's review against another edition
3.0
While I am sure I am not the first, nor the last, to spout praise for Vivian Gornick's part-craft-book-part-personal-narrative-part-literary-criticism, The Situation and the Story, it's certainly one helluva book. In this book, Gornick seems to (re)teach us that to be good writers means to first be good readers. It is through her specific textual analyses of works by Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, Edmund Gosse, James Baldwin, and Marguerite Duras, among others, that she teaches us the significance of developing a persona, or "truth-speaker," in any work of creative nonfiction, essay or memoir. This persona offers the point of view, or specific lens, through which we experience the writer's experience. At first, I thought Gornick seemed to be advocating for a contrived persona, which I thought might produce a lack of authenticity that I fundamentally disagree with in creative nonfiction, but now I believe that "persona" must be created with purpose to best serve the story needing to be told.
Gornick's main thesis, which seems to connect every page throughout the entire book, maintains that in every (successful) work of creative nonfiction, there must be two elements complicating and communicating with each other: the situation and the story. In my own words, Gornick's "situation" involves the individual details of an experience, while the "story" involves what the writer is able to make of it all, or, in Natalie's terms, its "aboutness."
Gornick offers an example of this "aboutness" towards the end of her book in writing about a student's essay in which the narrator explores a trunk of her grandfather's belongings, the closest she's ever come to "knowing" him. But the conclusion that the essay is about the grandfather is unsatisfactory to the workshop. The essay's subject is more complex than that, less obvious. In writing about not knowing her grandfather, the author was actually writing about her relationship with her grandmother. "Aboutness" is often something that I struggle with in my own writing, often to the point of frustration, and while Gornick does not provide a step-by-step process of finding an essay's true aboutness, I do feel she's given me a better understanding of what it is and why it's an important element of successful creative nonfiction.
In her conclusion, Gornick makes a blunt statement: "...I have learned that you cannot teach people how to write--the gift of dramatic expressiveness, of a natural sense of structure, of making language sink down beneath the surface of description, all that is inborn, cannot be taught--but you can teach people how to read, how to develop judgement about a piece of writing: their own as well as that of others," which I, at first, fundamentally disagreed with. Surely Vivian Gornick does not possess a fixed mindset regarding the ability to write well? I believe, or rather I am choosing to interpret, that Gornick's statement means that there is no concrete formula or template for teaching things such as dramatic expressiveness, an innate sense of structure (including when/how to decide upon and create a structure that best serves the story needing to be told), and so on, but that these "gifts" can be bestowed upon a (wannabe-)writer if she learns how to read well and if she reads often, that this writer may develop a natural sense of how to write well if she has the will to do so.
Gornick's main thesis, which seems to connect every page throughout the entire book, maintains that in every (successful) work of creative nonfiction, there must be two elements complicating and communicating with each other: the situation and the story. In my own words, Gornick's "situation" involves the individual details of an experience, while the "story" involves what the writer is able to make of it all, or, in Natalie's terms, its "aboutness."
Gornick offers an example of this "aboutness" towards the end of her book in writing about a student's essay in which the narrator explores a trunk of her grandfather's belongings, the closest she's ever come to "knowing" him. But the conclusion that the essay is about the grandfather is unsatisfactory to the workshop. The essay's subject is more complex than that, less obvious. In writing about not knowing her grandfather, the author was actually writing about her relationship with her grandmother. "Aboutness" is often something that I struggle with in my own writing, often to the point of frustration, and while Gornick does not provide a step-by-step process of finding an essay's true aboutness, I do feel she's given me a better understanding of what it is and why it's an important element of successful creative nonfiction.
In her conclusion, Gornick makes a blunt statement: "...I have learned that you cannot teach people how to write--the gift of dramatic expressiveness, of a natural sense of structure, of making language sink down beneath the surface of description, all that is inborn, cannot be taught--but you can teach people how to read, how to develop judgement about a piece of writing: their own as well as that of others," which I, at first, fundamentally disagreed with. Surely Vivian Gornick does not possess a fixed mindset regarding the ability to write well? I believe, or rather I am choosing to interpret, that Gornick's statement means that there is no concrete formula or template for teaching things such as dramatic expressiveness, an innate sense of structure (including when/how to decide upon and create a structure that best serves the story needing to be told), and so on, but that these "gifts" can be bestowed upon a (wannabe-)writer if she learns how to read well and if she reads often, that this writer may develop a natural sense of how to write well if she has the will to do so.
drgus_7's review against another edition
4.0
I still think about this book when I read books of many genres (short stories, memoir, novels, and poetry) that try to tell a story but fail.
rbrtsorrell's review against another edition
2.0
Gornick's book is full of the kind of platitudes that often make books about writing either boring or unhelpful. There is one good idea, however, and that only takes a sentence to explain: A situation and a story are not the same thing. In it's own way it's sort of a useful idea, but you don't need to read the book to understand that.