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Who We are in Memoir: A New Book

Posted in books, College Teaching, Italian Americans, memoir, Uncategorized on .

I am pondering who we are and want to be in memoir.

Maybe we have no choice. But writing takes time and revision and so, in fact, we always do.

Reading Joan Didion’s BLUE NIGHTS made me sad: for her daughter, for sure, but also for Didion herself, who has not entered old age with resilience or any care for wisdom. She’s frail, she tells us again and again. But she’s also Joan Didion and a killer writer still, though she claims not and relies more than may be wise on the repetition of key phrases. All through the book——a book about her daughter’s death——you keep wondering, what happened? What several things (for there seem to be several things) went wrong? It’s not that kind of memoir. Didion will not go there so you need to look back at THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING to hear more.

Francisco Goldman’s SAY HER NAME, which I thought wonderful and gripping, sent me on this memoir binge. Roland Barthes’ MOURNING DIARY kept me there since I had recently lost a mother and a brother too.

So I have been doing my own writing hoping to do it in way that feels true to me and speaks to others. I am processing my new book: PICNIC IN THE DARK: THE CLASSICS AT A TIME OF WAR AND LOSS. It’s a sequel to my earlier memoir about growing up in-between Italian and Jewish American cultures in New York. It’s also a meditation on why we read classic books at times of loss and how they speak to us at this time of ongoing wartime.

I’ll say more from time to on www.mariannatorgovnick.tumblr.com. I love this work and can’t wait to read more!

Digital newspapers

Okay… like most of us, I read the paper online as well as in print.  It’s been sad to see stories I read on the net appear days later in the NY TIMES.  It’s like a confession that print journalism is not just on the ropes but down for what is likely to be a permanent count.

That said, I am away from my NY TIMES and want to sing an ode to hard copies.

For one thing, there is the physical pleasure of holding the page and flipping back and forth at will.  For another. there is the surround:  what appears next to what on page one.  Which ads appear in which context.  And then there is the matter of attention.  I don’t read every word in print but am far less likely to do so on the screen.  Am I unusual?  Miss you NY TIMES and look forward to having you back.