The Situation And The Story, by Vivian Gornick

How to write "personal narrative"

Any book about writing has that weird/funny meta-ness to it where, like, it better be a @£$ing well-written book. You know what I mean? The author is claiming to have the secret to good writing, and you're reading their writing, and you're inevitably holding them to an unusually high standard for writing.

I think about that whenever I see those ads on fb for Sales Seminars or whatever – they claim to have the Secret of Sales, but they've never managed to sell their product to me (I think to myself, smugly). In a sense they should publish their numbers – "we've sold $100k's worth of this course which claims to tell people how to make money selling courses" – but they never do. Something something the people who get rich during a gold rush are the ones selling courses on how to sell shovels.

I listened to the audiobook, read by the author, whose voice I can only describe as "raspy". Why is there such magic to human voices? Why is it so poorly correlated with what "should" be a good reading voice?

Gornick cites many passages from many other authors, and it's hard for me to remember who she's citing at any given time, and (worse) whether she's citing anyone or just speaking as herself. I'm not sure how that changes the message of the book, but somehow the indistinguishability of her and the authors feels meaningful to me.

Despite having just read this book, it's hard for me to tell you exactly what it's message is. I believe the core claims are

1) that situation and story are not the same, that you need a good story as well as a good situation

2)  good personal narrative needs to create juuuust the right distance from The Self – not too close, not too far. If the writer is talking about herself, it ought to be for the sake of a bigger point, not for its own sake.

3) the real point/difficulty is finding the right Narrator Perspective for a given essay: not too close, not too far, with the right relation to the topic at hand, such that the personal story illuminates the topic (and not the topic illuminates your own life)

These points are... fine? They do not tell you how to get things Just Right, which is (of course) the difficult thing to do.

I mainly leave this book with a long list of essays/books that Gornick thinks are good. This is one of those books that has given me a list of ~10 other books I now vaguely want to read. And some readers say that "leaves you with a list of other books you want to read" is a good quality for a book to have. But I'm not so sure! I wonder whether it's just a sign of how tempting it always is to buy more books, and how little it takes to nudge you towards to feeling that you ought to read [some book]. The grass is always greener, and buying things is always (temporarily) satisfying, because you have a goal and then you achieve it, while the rest of your goals in life go un-achieved.