A review by ralovesbooks
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
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)