## Metadata - Author: [[Vivian Gornick]] - Full Title: The Situation and the Story - Category: #books - Document Tags: [[craft]] [[Misc./Funny/Writing]] ## Highlights - This buildup is called texture. ([Location 31](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=31)) - The better the speaker imagined herself, the more vividly she brought the dead doctor to life. ([Location 41](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=41)) - Because the narrator knew who was speaking, she always knew why she was speaking.     The writing we call personal narrative is written by people who, in essence, are imagining only themselves: in relation to the subject in hand. ([Location 52](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=52)) - narrator becomes a persona. Its tone of voice, its angle of vision, the rhythm of its sentences, ([Location 56](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=56)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot address directly—inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires—but must address to achieve felt reality. ([Location 59](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=59)) - 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. ([Location 65](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=65)) - the twin struggle to know not only why one is speaking but who is speaking. ([Location 68](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=68)) - Three who did it brilliantly during those years were Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, and Norman Mailer. ([Location 88](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=88)) - 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. ([Location 124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=124)) - Augustine’s Confessions remains something of a model for the memoirist. In it, Augustine tells the tale of his conversion to Christianity. That’s the situation. In this tale, he moves from an inchoate sense of being to a coherent sense of being, from an idling existence to a purposeful one, from a state of ignorance to one of truth. That’s the story. Inevitably, it’s a story of self-discovery and self-definition. ([Location 131](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=131)) - “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.” ([Location 136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=136)) - The ability to make us believe that we know who is speaking is the trustworthy narrator achieved. ([Location 177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=177)) - Ackerley may not have the powers of a poet, but in My Father and Myself he certainly has the intent. ([Location 204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=204)) - In each case the writer was possessed of an insight that organized the writing, and in each case a persona had been created to serve the insight. ([Location 245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=245)) - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience—it ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=267)) - “On the Pleasure of Hating.” ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=277)) - Virginia Woolf didn’t have difficulty attaching herself to life, she would not have written “The Death of the Moth.” ([Location 277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=277)) - “Notes of a Native Son.” ([Location 279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=279)) - These writers might not “know” themselves—that is, have no more self-knowledge than the rest of us—but in each case—and this is crucial—they know who they are at the moment of writing. They know they are there to clarify in relation to the subject in hand—and on this obligation they deliver. ([Location 284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=284)) - “Now, women used to understand this better than men … used to know that life is … not a question of points, but a question of flow. It’s the flow that matters … And only the flow.” ([Location 303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=303)) - In nonfiction, the writer has only the singular self to work with. So it is the other in oneself that the writer must seek and find to create movement, achieve a dynamic. Inevitably, the piece builds only when the narrator is involved not in confession but in this kind of self-investigation, the kind that means to provide motion, purpose, and dramatic tension. Here, it is self-implication that is required. To see one’s own part in the situation—that is, one’s own frightened or cowardly or self-deceived part—is to create the dynamic. ([Location 344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=344)) - Joan Didion’s “In Bed,” Harry Crews’s “Why I Live Where I Live,” and Edward Hoagland’s “The Courage of Turtles.” ([Location 350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=350)) - some of the finest essays in American literature. ([Location 357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=357)) - Harry Crews, a violently self-mythicizing Southerner, writes novels and stories set in the Georgia swamp culture from which he emerged. ([Location 415](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=415)) - Seymour Krim ([Location 527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=527)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Krim is a Jewish Joan Didion. ([Location 528](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=528)) - Tags: [[pink]] - “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” ([Location 540](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=540)) - “That’s because I come from America, which has to be the classic, ultimate, then-they-broke-the-mold incubator of not knowing who you are until you find out. I have never really found out and I expect what remains of my life to be one long search party for the final me. I don’t kid myself that I’m alone in this, hardly, and I don’t really think that the great day will ever come when I hold a finished me in my fist and say here you are, congratulations. I’m talking primarily about the expression of that me in the world, the shape it takes, the profile it zings out, the ‘work’ it does. ([Location 545](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=545)) - Note: Awesome - “You may sometimes think everyone lives in the crotch of the pleasure principle these days except you, but you have company, friend. I live under the same pressures you do. It is still your work or role that finally gives you your definition in our society, and the thousands upon thousands of people who I believe are like me are those who have never found the professional skin to fit the riot in their souls. Many never will. I think what I have to say here will speak for some of their secret life and for that other sad America you don’t hear too much about. This isn’t presumption so much as a voice of scars and stars talking. I’ve lived it and will probably go on living it until they take away my hotdog. ([Location 549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=549)) - I happened on the work of Jean Amery, a European journalist who in the 1960s wrote a remarkable series of essays on aging. ([Location 600](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=600)) - Tags: [[pink]] - Growing old, he concluded, was worse than Auschwitz. The terror of the concentration camp, he said, was “less filled with internal horror and anguish than the experience of aging.” The horror and the anguish became his subject. ([Location 603](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=603)) - Tags: [[pink]] - The natural world becomes alien as well: who wants to look at a mountain that one can no longer climb? or swim in water that denies us the exactly right temperature? ([Location 613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=613)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “[A]ging is not a ‘normal condition’ for the aging person … Actually, it is quite definitely a sickness, indeed a form of suffering from which there is no hope of recovery … Aging is an incurable sickness, and because it is a form of suffering it is subject to the same phenomenal laws as any other acute hardship that afflicts us at some particular stage of life … ([Location 633](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=633)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “I married the man I married because I liked his version of myself better than my own. I married him because I loved him, because I felt more real with him than I had felt with anyone else … I married him because he loved Ford Madox Ford, because he made the perfect martini, because we could fight and the walls did not fall down, because he was more at home with being a man than any man I knew, because he shouldered responsibility with deceptive ease, and because his eyes welled up with tears elicited by the everyday grace of ordinary people. ([Location 683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=683)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “When I was single, I equated marriage with drowning: Your identity disappeared, your privacy was invaded, your self submerged. After I married, I found out that I was right; what I hadn’t known was how much of an amphibian I could be … ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=704)) - Tags: [[blue]] - “Handsome, proud, and ingrown, ‘like a toe-nail,’ ([Location 824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=824)) - “All of Harlem, indeed, seemed to be infected by waiting. I had never before known it to be so violently still … I had never before been so aware of policemen … everywhere … Nor had I ever been so aware of small knots of people. They were on stoops and on corners and in doorways, and what was striking about them, I think, was that they did not seem to be talking … ([Location 844](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=844)) - But 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. ([Location 920](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=920)) - Tags: [[orange]] - Resistance to earning our way is the common lot of humanity—we all resent deeply having to grow up—but one way or another, most of us make our peace with the requirement short of criminal recalcitrance. ([Location 1148](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=1148)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Having said than the narrator in a memoir must always be reliable, always working hard to get to the bottom of the experience in hand, ([Location 1209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0080K3OHI&location=1209))