The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
by Vivian Gornick
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Book Summary Information
Author: Vivian GornickEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2002-10-11
ISBN: 0374528586
Number of pages: 184
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
Book Review: Excavating a Life
Summary: 5 Stars
Writers can be like cats, waiting for the right piece of string to be dangled in front of them, the one that tugs. The Situation and Story was that string for me, with the right words and examples at the right time to pull me forward. It's how Gornick describes the necessity to get inside one's own mind, excavate its interiority that makes the book magic. For example, she says, memoir is "a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows," a way to get acquainted with the stranger who lives inside your own skin." Her use of favorite writers' (Joan Didion and Loren Eisley) stories really helped illustrate for me the situation and the story. Most useful, as a writer of memoir, were these words: "Memoir isn't what happened but what the writer makes of what happened." That's the key to memoir I didn't understand before.
Summary of The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of LoveAll narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.
How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.
This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.
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