A review by genrichards
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
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.