"Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard, hard work."
p. 9, The Situation and the Story
"From journalism to the essay to the memoir: the trip being taken by a nonfiction person deepens, and turns ever more inward."
p. 17, The Situation and the Story
The Situation and the Story is one of Gornick’s best books. Published in 2001, it is chock full of observations about writing and writers, and more specifically, about how to make your narrative not only come alive, but also work as a story that the reader can’t put down. I believe this book is a must read for anyone writing memoir. We read a portion of Gornick’s most recent memoir, The Odd Woman and the City, this past spring. I don’t think that book is her best work. If you are looking for more Gornick to read, take a look at her brilliant memoir, Fierce Attachments, in which she tells two parallel stories about her life with her mother, and weaves childhood memories of living with her mother in a small apartment in the Bronx with modern recollections of walking around Manhattan with her mother, two older women, roaming the city.
In these first few pages of The Situation and the Story, Gornick explains to us what makes a good eulogy. A good eulogy is a great story. There is a narrative arc----a beginning, a middle and an end. If it’s done well, it makes you smile, laugh and cry, and it will stay with you. You will talk about it in the car ride home.
Here is what Gornick writes about the eulogist and the eulogy, and what made it all work (pages 4-5): “The eulogist had been remembering herself as a young doctor coming under the formative influence of the older one. The memory had acted as an organizing principle that determined the structure of her remarks. Structure had imposed order. Order made the sentences more shapely. Shapeliness increased the expressiveness of the language. Expressiveness deepened association. At last, the dramatic buildup occurred, one that had layered into it the descriptive feel of a young person’s apprenticeship, medical practices in a time of social change, and a divided attachment to mentor who could bring herself only to correct, never to praise. This buildup is called texture. It was the texture that stirred me, caused me to feel, with powerful immediacy ,not only the actuality of the woman being remembered but---even more vividly---the presence of the one doing the remembering. The speaker’s effort to recall with exactness how things had been between herself and the dead woman--her open need to make sense of a strong but vexing relationship---had caused her to say so much that I became aware at last of all that was not being said; that which could never be said. I felt acutely the warm, painful inadequacy of human relations. The feeling resonated in me. It was the resonance that had lingered on, exactly as it does when the last page is turned of a book that reaches the heart…The volatility of their exchange brought us to the heart of the reminiscence.”
All our stories need organizing principles, structure, texture and tension. And every great story, be it fiction or non-fiction, is ultimately about the painful inadequacy of human relations, and our strong and vexing relationships. Needless to say, any great story must resonate.
On page 6, Gornick delves further into why the eulogy works. “The speaker never lost sight of why she was speaking, or perhaps more important, of who was speaking. Of the various selves at her disposal (she was, after all, many people---a daughter, a lover, a bird-watcher, a New Yorker), she knew and didn’t forget the the only proper self to invoke was the one that had been apprenticed. That was the self in whom this story resides. .. Because the narrator knew who was speaking, she always knew why she was speaking." Gornick is essentially referring to what Dani Shapiro refers to as “the frame” in her book Still Writing: What is the frame for your story? For this eulogist, the frame for her story was her relationship with the woman who had passed away. Nothing else mattered to the eulogy.
If you are writing memoir, or are writing fiction with a close third person protagonist, you need to find the most interesting and compelling characteristics of your character. If you read nothing else in Gornick’s book, read this (especially if you are writing memoir): “It’s like lying down on on the couch in public---and while a writer may be willing to do just that, is a strategy that most often simply doesn’t work. Think of how many years on the couch it takes to speak about oneself, but without all the wining and complaining, the self-hatred and the self justification that makes the anylsand a bore to all the world but the analyst. The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing, that is to be of value to the disinterested reader. ..Yet the creation of such a persona a is vital to an essay or a memoir. It is the instrument of illumination. Without it there is neither subject nor story. To achieve it, the writer of memoir or essay undergoes an apprenticeship as soul-searching as any undergone by novelist or poet: the twin struggle to know not only why one is speaking but who is speaking…”
Gornick is upfront about her own challenges early on as a published writer. When she looks back at a book she wrote about her experiences in Egypt (page 12), she realized it had basically been a mess: “It seems to me for a long time that the problem had been detachment: I hadn’t had any, hadn’t even known it was a thing to be prized; that, in fact, without detachment there can be no story; description and response, yes, but no story.” When you are writing about yourself, or about your protagonist, you must maintain some detachment so that the reader is free to form his or her own opinions. If you tell the reader everything, she will feel spoon-fed and ultimately powerless. Letting her come to a few conclusions on her own makes her feel as if she is gaining insight into your character, and you want to give the reader that power.
On page 13, we come to the heart of Gornick’s book. She explains: “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 experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” She writes of Augustine’s Confessions, essentially a fantastic memoir: “Inevitably, it’s the story of self-discovery and self-definition. The subject of autobiography is always self-deifnition, but it cannot be self-definition in the voice. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experiences makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom---or rather the movement toward it---that counts. ‘Good writing has two characteristics,’ a gifted teacher of writing once said. “It’s alive on the page and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.’ The poet, the novelist, the memoirist---all must convince the reader they have some wisdom, and are writing as honestly as possible to arrive at what they know.”
On pages 14-17, Gornick writes at length about how important it is for the narrator of nonfiction to appear trustworthy (she delves into this by dissecting the character George Orwell creates for himself in his essay, "Shooting an Elephant,” which we read read earlier this year.) I love this sentence from pages 16-17: “The narrator records his rage, yet the writing is not enraged; the narrator hates Empire, yet his hate is not out of control; the narrator shrinks from the natives, yet his repulsion is tinged with compassion. At all times he is possessed of a sense of history, proportion, and paradox. In short, a highly respectable intelligence confesses to having been reduced in a situation that would uncivilize anyone, including you the reader.” All great narrators of memoir should reach for this control in their writing. Terrible things are happening, or have happened to the protagonist (aka the narrator who is acting out the story), but the narrator who is actually writing the story will calmly explain them to you and it is vital that you trust that writing narrator to get it right.
We never read JR Ackerley in class, but on pages 18-20, Gornick does a nice job of explaining how Ackerley, who may not have been such a great person in real life, paints himself as a likable narrator in his memoir, My Father and Myself. On page 19, she writes: “Ackerley, as I have experienced him in writing about him, often seems nasty or pathetic; the Ackerley speaking here in My Father and Myself is a wholly engaging man, not because he sets out to be fashionably honest but because the reader feels him actively working to strip down the anxiety until he can get to something hard and true beneath the smooth surface of sentimental self-regard. It took Ackerley thirty years to clarify the voice the could tell his story---thirty years to gain detachment, make an honest man of himself, become a trustworthy narrator. Incident by incident, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, we have the glory of an achieved persona.”
Finally, I love what Gornick writes on page 25, about her own efforts to keep a strong, controlling hand on the character o her narrator as she writes her own essays and memoirs: "I become interested then in my own existence only as a means of penetrating the situation in hand. I have created a persona who can find the story riding the tide that I, in my unmediated state, am otherwise going to drown in.” In other words, she stays focused on gathering up only the most important, central elements of a big, wide, unfocused story. She gathers up the details, dialogues and episodes that will serve her story, and stays focused on weaving that thread through her story. She stays on task so that she can tell a precise, narrow, powerful and ultimately, memorable story.
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