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snurriBooks 1-10.
Books 11-20.
21. And Now We are Going to Have a Party by Nicola Griffith. Memoirs tend to make me uncomfortable; there, I said it. Some memoirs are like a person who overshares in a crowded bar, a person at the next table whom you don't know, have no desire to know, and yet by the end of the evening you know more about their personal life than you do about your own. Some memoirs are about lives so adventurous that they make me feel like the most boring person alive; and some of those, of course, are full of lies. When I read a memoir I inevitably start to wonder if I could write one, and the answer--so far, anyway--is always no. But I digress. It's perhaps trickiest to read a memoir like this, written by someone you vaguely know and are somewhat in awe of, as I am of Nicola Griffith. Here she paints--sometimes in broad strokes, sometimes in splashes of raw color--her development as a person and a writer, from her earliest memories to her move from England to the U.S. in 1989. It's a compelling narrative, and a very personal and vulnerable one, presented in a box-of-memories format, with five chapbooks containing the book, a CD, postcards, and a box of childhood writings and drawings. It's also made me think that perhaps one of the reasons that memoirs make me uncomfortable is that they can offer simultaneous flashes of recognition and alienation; there are parts of Griffith's story that are like mine, and then there are other parts that are very unlike. It's the push-and-pull of intimacy and difference that we always get when we are close to someone, so dissonant and yet so necessary; in that sense in particular, writing a book like this is an act of bravery. Not uncomfortable or dubious, but like a friendly conversation over a couple of drinks sitting at a booth in a half-filled pub, it's just right.
Books 11-20.
21. And Now We are Going to Have a Party by Nicola Griffith. Memoirs tend to make me uncomfortable; there, I said it. Some memoirs are like a person who overshares in a crowded bar, a person at the next table whom you don't know, have no desire to know, and yet by the end of the evening you know more about their personal life than you do about your own. Some memoirs are about lives so adventurous that they make me feel like the most boring person alive; and some of those, of course, are full of lies. When I read a memoir I inevitably start to wonder if I could write one, and the answer--so far, anyway--is always no. But I digress. It's perhaps trickiest to read a memoir like this, written by someone you vaguely know and are somewhat in awe of, as I am of Nicola Griffith. Here she paints--sometimes in broad strokes, sometimes in splashes of raw color--her development as a person and a writer, from her earliest memories to her move from England to the U.S. in 1989. It's a compelling narrative, and a very personal and vulnerable one, presented in a box-of-memories format, with five chapbooks containing the book, a CD, postcards, and a box of childhood writings and drawings. It's also made me think that perhaps one of the reasons that memoirs make me uncomfortable is that they can offer simultaneous flashes of recognition and alienation; there are parts of Griffith's story that are like mine, and then there are other parts that are very unlike. It's the push-and-pull of intimacy and difference that we always get when we are close to someone, so dissonant and yet so necessary; in that sense in particular, writing a book like this is an act of bravery. Not uncomfortable or dubious, but like a friendly conversation over a couple of drinks sitting at a booth in a half-filled pub, it's just right.
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Date: 2010-04-05 02:54 am (UTC)