Thomas's Reviews > The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

3.5 stars

A cerebral and abstract homage to the art of personal narrative. Vivian Gornick skips over the fundamental techniques of creative nonfiction to address the craft's deeper issues: the importance of empathy, the construction of the self, and how this style differs from fiction and poetry. She spends a large portion of the book analyzing other writers' work and dissects how they use their "selves" to separate the situation and the story. As a creative nonfiction fanboy, quite a few passages made me sigh in pleasure. One quote I enjoyed about the fashioning of a persona through nonfiction narrative:

"To fashion a persona out of one's own undisguised self is no easy thing. 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. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one... 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."

Overall, a thoughtful and thorough examination of the essay and the memoir. Those who want more direct instruction may feel disappointed with this one, because Gornick shares a few gems about writing and then applies them to a gamut of work. Still, her years of experience and deep appreciation of the craft shine in The Situation and the Story. Would recommend for those who want to get serious with writing personal narrative. A couple more quotes I loved from the book to end this review:

"In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension... For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life."

"The idea of the self - the one that controls the memoir - is almost always served through a single piece of awareness that clarifies only slowly in the writer, gaining strength and definition as the narrative progresses. In a bad memoir, the line of clarification remains muddy, uncertain indistinct. In a good one, it becomes the organizing principle - the thing that lends shape and texture to the writing, drives the narrative forward, provides direction and unity of purpose. The question clearly being asked in an exemplary memoir is 'Who am I'? Who exactly is this 'I' upon whom turns the significance of this story-taken-directly-from-life? On that question the writer of memoir must deliver. Not with an answer but with depth of inquiry."