Inevitable “I” Part 2
In Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, she writes: The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that counts. The world—the context within which the author’s life plays out—must show up in our story as well, and this inclusion requires memoirists to “move toward wisdom”, or, as I would put it, draw connections between one’s private life and the human experience. The connections are both inherent in the lived experience as well as created in the writing experience. Gornick goes on to say: 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…
Inevitable “I”
If we show up in our stories as a character, our memoirs are stronger. Why? A reader entering a story needs shoes to walk around in and a pair of lenses to see through. We are embodied creatures. Even in the two-dimensional world of language, we need bodies or, at the very least, personality. Every reader of creative nonfiction is aware of the author lurking behind the story and brings to reading the expectation that the author will appear, either as character or narrator. Graham Swift wrote this about his fiction: “I favor the first person. One reason I do so is that I do not want simply to tell, out of the blue, a story. I want to show the pressure and need for its telling—I am as interested in the narrator as in the narrative. I want to explore the urgency of the relation between the two.” Swift’s…