Book launch publicity tip!

1. Buy a cake for your book launch. Preferably a big one.

2. Write “BOOK LAUNCH” in gigantic letters on the cake.

3. Walk around the grocery store with this in your cart.

That’s it! I did this in the fall when my the-anthology-that-published-my-story came out, simply intending to buy a cake for the small party I was holding. I wasn’t trying to get attention, but I got a lot of it.

Three different people approached me asking what the book was and told me congratulations. And I live in a small city! One person asked where the launch was being held, so she could go. I had to tell her it was just a private party for my friends and family, but I decided that when I actually *do* have my own book and a public launch, I’m definitely going to do this again.

Has anyone else discovered similar tricks?

Review & response to John Scalzi’s book on writing

Last night I finished reading John’s Scalzi’s You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing. The book is a compilation of blog posts from The Whatever, Scalzi’s blog, from about 2001-2005. I had heard great things about how this book talks about the business side of writing, and the first half of the book delivered.

This book came to me at the perfect time. I’m taking a fresh look at my day job/career, and this book along with another one I’m reading (Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin) are definitely giving me many ideas to consider.

I liked Scalzi’s message about day jobs: they are insurance for your creative writing career, so hold on to them for as long as you can. Only consider letting them go when your writing work brings in at least 30% more income than your day job (this is to make up for insurance and pensions and other things you don’t get working on your own). The exception, of course, would be if your day job is hurting your mental health. Then find another day job that works better for you.

Scalzi starts the book describing how he decided to write for a living in order to get out of doing “real work.” But he then goes on to say he soon discovered that writing — if you do it as a job, for income — *is* real work, though probably more enjoyable than flipping burgers.

He holds down a number of different contracts, writing for magazines and newspapers, doing high-paid corporate writing, and, finally, doing his creative writing. He says his novels bring in the least amount of income — if he had to live on that, he wouldn’t be in very good shape at all. But, through contacts he’s created after more than a decade of being a journalist with traditional and new media, he holds down a number of fairly stable writing contracts, the odd corporate job, and then he fits his creative writing into that. His schedule reflects this. He writes about two hours a day, and then turns to his other writing gigs.

Scalzi emphasizes that if you try to make a living off  of writing, then you’re going to end up writing things you don’t necessarily want to write. If you don’t want to do that, then keep your day job and write what you want on evenings and weekends. There’s nothing wrong with that — he wrote his first novel that way, and many other people do, too.

But if you want to write full time, then it’s unlikely you will be able to make ends meet, let alone live comfortably, by your creative writing alone. Scalzi himself does pretty well. He boasts an average of a six-figure income from his writing gigs. He finds it best to branch out into multiple areas of paid writing — that way if and when some areas run dry, you can build on your other writing competencies.

I found this information very helpful. Scalzi outlines what has worked for him, saying that what works for us, the readers, will be different, but this gives us some ideas to start with. Though I have a degree in journalism, I am not interested in freelancing, which is a path Scalzi, as a journalist, recommends. I would rather centre my writing around creative writing. According to Scalzi, that means I should hold on to my day job. This comes at an opportune time, since my day job is changing, and with this new perspective, I think I can make those changes work for me.

His varied paid writing sources also gives me ideas for what would be appropriate for me. I have a master’s in history, and I do a lot of contract work with history professors, usually in historical research. But currently I have another contract, and guess what that is? Writing. Academic writing, but it’s still writing. I didn’t think about it in this way when I took the contract, but after reading Scalzi’s book I am very excited to realize that academic writing could be my version of his corporate writing. Not as well paid, I’m sure, but definitely a viable day-job replacement or supplement.

Scalzi’s thoughts about the business and monetary side of writing comprise about 1/4 of the book, and clearly I got a lot from these sections. These were definitely the strongest part of the book. Another 1/4 was devoted to writing and publishing tips, and those parts were also interesting and useful, though perhaps less unique.

The blog entries in the second half of the book (with sections on his various gripes with writers and his genre, science fiction) were hit or miss for me. Some blog posts did not translate well to book form, often referring to controversies long over and which only came to a vague writerly point near the end of the piece. Some of these had good messages for writers, but these tips got lost in specifics that are no longer relevant or, frankly, all that interesting.

There are some gems in these sections, though. The post on The Cynical Writer (where Scalzi talks about how, yes, he did find out what scifi books sold well before deciding what to write for his first novel) is very unique and interesting. I haven’t seen many creative writers talk in this blunt (though not heartless) way. You can see Scalzi’s journalism career shine through here (he approaches novel writing as a journalist would approach any other story), which is a theme throughout the book.

Another gem is Workshop Fracas, where Scalzi lights into writers who expect to be coddled and to have any criticism of their writing couched in niceities. In it is this wonderful, raving quote:

Writers … need to learn to stand their ground in the face of withering criticism. If your response to being slagged is to run away and write whiny letters about how your critic was unfair, man, are you ever in the wrong line of work. If you believe in your work, you fire back and you give as good as you get. You take your fight to your critic and make him or her back up the criticism. When your critics have a point, you learn and you move on. But when you think you’re right, you argue it, tooth and nail, and you win or die trying.”

The whole book is worth a read, but if you are pressed for time, the first half is definitely a must-read. And I just love the title. It made me laugh and laugh.

2009 Writing Wrap-up

2009 marked my first year writing more regularly. I had always done well with the deadline provided by National Novel Writing Month and National Novel Editing Month, but I had trouble outside of these and the other mini-challenges I set for myself. So in 2009 I signed up for National Novel Writing Year with a goal of 250,000 words. I also set a few additional goals of my own: completing 150 hours of editing, submitting essays and poems for publication, and working on a book proposal for a coffee-table book project related to my Twitter handle “herstorian.”

I started the year gung-ho to work on the book proposal, but an unexpected thing happened. What I think of as my lifelong writing project — my childhood memoir — started vying for my attention.  I found myself thinking about it, and thus working on it, more and more. I decided to set aside the coffee-table book project for now (it would be more viable when the economy is doing better, anyway). I had written a partial draft of my memoir for my first National Novel Writing Month challenge in 2006, and had subsequently tinkered with editing and adding to it. I now have it planned out, and over half of a first draft written and reviewed by my critique group. My goal is to finish the first draft in the spring of 2010 and get it out to a few readers in the summer.

Early in the year I wrote and submitted a short story from the above-mentioned childhood memoir. It was accepted, and in September it was printed by Wising Up Press in the anthology Double Lives, Reinvention, and Those We Leave Behind. To gain experience in marketing my own books (or what I call “the book in which my story appears”), I bought 15 copies to sell to friends and give to family, and I only have a few left. Now I get to learn how to cite that on my taxes!

I also shared the short story — called Learning to Leave – with a number of people, and I’ve been surprised and touched by the response. Many people have responded passionately, demanding to know more. It is heartening to get this feedback, and definitely is good motivation to keep writing!

I also submitted short stories and poems to a few other publications and contests; one poem was published in Breadcrumb Scabs, and I will hear back on one contest this month. In 2010 I want to increase my submission rate ten-fold, starting with a goal of submitting to 5 publications per month.

In March, my National Novel Editing Month was a great success. It was my second year attempting it after reaching 30/50 hours in 2006; in 2009 I reached 55/50 hours. Hours are a LOT harder to fill than words are to write! I got a LOT done in those 55 hours, and I’m definitely participating again this year. Through editing, I found many pieces and essays I had forgotten about, rough writing that I can fashion into more polished pieces that I can submit for publication. I even found a poem while editing — the poem that was published! I am still very chuffed about that.  I came across a line that took my breath away and said poem to me. I played with structure, and voila! The editing process really is a process of rediscovery.

In the summer I took a “life writing” workshop with the Maritime Writers’ Workshop that was very helpful. I learned a lot about the writing process, and it was great to talk to a published author one-on-one.

The final big project of the year — other than NaNoWriMo, of course — was research for my childhood memoir, which took up my August and September. Frankly, I found it frustrating. It was slow-going and emotionally difficult. It’s by no means finished, but I think (hope!) it’s something I can work on in bits and pieces throughout 2010. I really didn’t like dedicating all that time (other than some writing and light editing) to research – it was very hard to feel like I was getting anything productive done.  But, in the end, I went through all my letters and memorabelia and  set aside the ones relevant to my project, and I found my journals and started typing up the relevant entries. I have a very good idea of what is left to be done.

Another exciting 2009 development was my “discovery” of Twitter. I had an account previously, but I never understood the attraction. It was when I heard that Twtter was a great tool for writers that I started giving it a chance. I think it was #litchat that hooked me. All of a sudden I was talking with published authors — and unpublished authors like me who were writing seriously, writing every day. It was, and continues to be, a great inspiration to me to see people doing what I am doing, and what I want to be doing.  I am always sad at the end of NaNoWriMo, to see this wonderful and supportive group of writers disperse for another year. This year I wasn’t so sad when I realized that, hey, Twitter is my year-round writing community! With tags like #amwriting and #amwritingparty, I definitely look forward to exploring Twitter-for-writers more in the new year!

Crafting stories from our vast experiences

I’m thick into National Novel Writing Month, but I saw this book at a friend’s house, scanned the introduction, and have to record this great description of “story” versus “experience”:

There is a difference [between story and experience]. A story has shape, outlines, limits; an experience blurs at the edges and tends to merge imperceptibly with related experiences. In many cases, experiences are what happen to us, whereas stories happen to other people.

Experiences are intensely complicated and hard to recount: for instance, I could describe the first failed marriages of a dozen friends with far more clarity than I could describe my own. That’s because I know too much about my personal history, and lack the distance necessary for simplicity.

Stories, in order to become stories, must be simplified, stripped of extraneous detail and vagrant feeling. We find it easier to do this with the lives of others — though from time to time, we may apply the same technique to our own history.

– Robert Fulford, The Triumph of Narrative, Toronto: Anasi, 1999, p.4.

And those “extraneous detail[s] and vagrant feeling[s]” are part of what makes memoir writing so difficult; as opposed to the fiction writer, we don’t need to think about what to put in — we have to determine what to leave out!

Self-care when writing about emotional subjects

I’ve had two health-care professionals now tell me that I need to be more careful when researching for my childhood memoir. I see their point – I am visibly stressed, as it has been very difficult to be reminded of uncomfortable things that had faded from memory (I suppose for good reason).

But it is anathema to me to do anything halfway. I have a hard time doing bits of a project here and there. I like to dive in, stay up late nights, devote whole weekends to searching its depths. I have been diving into my memoir research since early August — for two months now. I am nowhere near finished, but I do agree it’s time to stop, and so I’m putting it away. What I did accomplish in that time was to pull out a number of letters and note a number of diary entries relevant to my project. Now they’re residing in clearly-labeled boxes that I will tackle in January, when National Novel Writing Month is over, and when I’ve had a month to recover (which I will surely need).

I’m left with the question of how to take care of one’s emotional self while writing or researching difficult topics – not only in memoir, but in any genre about a topic that hits too close to home. How do you balance emotional health and productivity? How do you recognize when you’re over-saturated and need to take a break? How long a break do you take? And how do you resist the impulse to dive in and do as much as you can as quickly as you can, and instead do things in small, drawn-out chunks? Does anyone else find this as difficult  as I do?

Review: Fat Girl (memoir)

It took me a  few false starts to write a review of Fat Girl: A True Story. I guess that in and of itself is a statement: this book is so thought-provoking it took me weeks to digest its contents, while at the same time being so scattered and narratively unfocused as to require me to do the work of digestion that is normally the job of the writer herself.

The good:

- This book is a compelling read. I could not put it down. The author starts her book with “I am fat. I am not so fat that I can’t fasten the seat belt on the plane. But, fat I am. I wanted to write about what it was and is like for me, being fat.” Clearly not the best writing, but it’s upfront and honest. She also warns early on that she will hold no punches and this won’t be like a normal memoir. That also intrigues the reader.

- The bulk of the book describes the childhood of her parents, how they met, why they divorced, and the author’s own troubled childhood. She offers enough detail for the reader to understand, generally, how these experiences led her to become the adult she is today. This section is the best part of the book.

The bad:

- The book has been touted as an example of what it’s like to be a “fat girl” today. I disagree. The book is a valuable historical source that documents what it was like to be considered a “fat girl” while growing up in the 1950s, when the current “obesity epidemic” had not yet hit; when it was rare to be overweight.* The author is not clear about exactly how big she is, though she says that her weight often yo-yoed and there were times when she was “almost thin.” Her daughter has said that her mother was never as big as she describes herself in the book, making me wonder, again, if perhaps that is a cultural and generational thing (i.e. she grew up with the 1950s notions of fat/thin and never caught on to the fact that her body size might be perfectly normal today).

- The book is framed as the story of a “fat girl,” but I again disagree. Perhaps that is accurate historically and by the author’s own self-definition (and probably sold more books than “Abused Girl” would have), but the book is really about a severely abused and neglected child who tried to find ways to cope with her childhood (and never really did). The book illustrates what it’s like to be depressed and to live with the legacy of childhood abuse; whether or not the survivor is fat is really beside the point. Plenty of “fat” people are happy; plenty of “thin” people are not.

The ugly:

- Fat Girl, as a complete and satisfying book, doesn’t work. There is no focus. The author starts off with details about her current “fat” life, the guys who tell her she’s “too fat to fuck,” the photo of herself on the Church bulletin that she sees and is filled with disgust. Then she starts the chronological story of her life and her parents’ life, which is really the gem of the book. But this detailed narrative stops once she reaches high school. She then skips to marriages and children, making disparaging remarks without any detail or explanation. She then has about two pages of “conclusion” whereby she feels sorry for herself, and then the book ends. She never returns back to the story of her current life from the beginning of the book, and the compelling narrative of her childhood abruptly ends with no reason given.

- The author makes no attempt to reflect on her experiences or share how she interprets them with the reader. (To be fair, she is clear from the beginning that she will neutrally describe her life so that the reader can come to their own conclusions about why she is fat.) The author describes many traumatic incidents, including sexual assault, and offers no reflection whatsoever. Something I’m beginning to learn as I read more memoirs is that reflection and offering your own perspective and interpretation is an essential part of the genre. Writing a neutral account of incidents in your life is, well, a police report. It’s a historical document. It’s not a novel.

Regardless of all of the above, I’m very glad I read the book. Since my aim at the moment is to study the genre, this gives me great examples of what not to do. I definitely appreciate the crafting of the other memoirs I’m reading now more than I otherwise would have. Fat Girl also teaches me that a book (unfortunately) doesn’t need good writing or a good narrative to sell. To put that more positively, as long as your underlying story is authentic and compelling, people will want to read it. Having a catchy title probably helps, too.

*The author was born in 1939, even before the baby boom

Here’s another good review of Fat Girl.

Canadian journalist on how to write a non-fiction book

Last fall I attended a non-fiction workshop put on by the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. It was a talk by Jacques Poitras, CBC journalist and the author of Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy and The Right Fight: Bernard Lord and the Conservative Dilemma.

Poitras said he’s used to talking to audiences about the content of his books, so he was excited to be able to talk to us about his process, his method for putting a non-fiction work together. He said that the Beaverbrook book was a very specific non-fiction book, since it was a journalistic work and done under a tight deadline. Due to his role at the CBC, he needed to be balanced and not take a side strongly in the controversy he was covering. He writes 2,000 – 5,000 words a day for his job, so he was used to the pace of writing a lot very quickly. To write the book, Poitras took 3 months off of work without pay. Teaching a course at St. Thomas University that semester (which took one day a week) helped, but his savings still took a big hit. He joked that having a wife who works full time helps.

He had a lot more time to write his first book, The Right Fight, and was able to prepare maps and outlines in the planning stages. For non-fiction you really need a plan or formula in order to get the story out – then you can add layers (beauty, meaning, lessons) as you edit it later. Poitras said his books have been relatively straight-forward to research and organize. With the Beaverbrook book, there was so much material so far away (in Britain!), he was thinking at first of writing it in the first person, like his own journey to find the truth. But, due to lack of time, it became easier to tell the story as it was.

He was really helped out in the research stage since both sides of the legal team agreed to share their research with him. So he received CDs of digitized research that he could go through at his leisure – hundreds of hours of research for free and at his fingertips! This made his job a lot easier.

To organize his research in preparation for writing, Poitras used colour highlighters since all his notes were in notebooks. He used a different colour for each chapter – say, green for chapter 7, pink for chapter 8, blue for chapter 9. Then he went though his notebooks and colour highlighted everything relevant to each chapter. When he sat down to write, he would go through the notebooks again looking for the correct colour in order to put together an outline for that chapter.

Poitras also had a secret blog, which he shared with a few friends for feedback. Here he would write rough notes about what he found. He used references in the blog posts so he knew where to find the originals in his notes.

As he wrote his books, he would make notes about facts he didn’t have (so, research he needed to do). Once he got those facts or did that research, he would plop them in to the appropriate place in the narrative outline. When he started writing the Beaverbrook book, he did NOT have the second half of the book outlined, but started writing about Beaverbrook’s life since it was fresh in his mind. When he hit a spot where he didn’t know something, he put that on his to-do list.

He treated each chapter as a separate story, with a beginning, middle, and end. Generally this was linear, with some time overlap which was dealt with in the text. For his book excerpt for the Telegraph Journal, he chose the chapter on Lady Beaverbrook – it stood on its own since it was a coherent story on her life.

When talking about an event, Poitras says you must tell the story through the individual story of a person. People move the story. You’re adapting the storytelling mode of fiction: keep the story focused and the action moving. If information that can’t be told through a personal story doesn’t fit, skip it; if it’s important, deal with it briefly.

Tone is important. If an event is thrilling but your account of it isn’t, then your account is false. To show the desperation and frenzy of an event, you must show this desperation and frenzy in the writing – in the sentences and flow.

Once you’re finished writing you book, Poitras recommends that you go back to the earlier parts and throw in hints of foreshadowing. These are bits of payoff for the reader.

On the search for the proper protagonist: In The Right Fight, the protagonist was a concept, not a person. (The book wasn’t really about former New Brunswick Premier Bernard Lord, as the title claims; it was about the right-wing movement in New Brunswick generally.) In the Beaverbrook book, Lord Beaverbrook was the protagonist for most of the book until his death. It was difficult to decide on a protagonist for the last part, the part about the fighting over the art collection at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, NB. The two Beaverbrook sons both had compelling stories. Poitras initially thought he’d focus on the son who had more of a, shall we say, dramatic persona in the media. But he ended up focusing on the other brother after interviewing him in Britain; this brother was a compelling character and had many insightful things to say.

After Poitras’ talk, one audience member asked about whether he used written permission forms for his interviews. Poitras responded that, per journalistic convention, if the person agrees to an interview, it is presumed that you will be using the material. Consent is implied and no written record is needed.

Another person asked about the length of his books, if he was clear how long they would be beforehand. Poitras said that his publisher asked for 80,000 words for his first book; he had 90,000 words in his first draft and ended up with 120,000 words, and the publisher didn’t cut it. For the Beaverbrook book, at first Poitras didn’t think he had enough material for a whole book. But after he wrote a chapter or two (and multiplied that by the number of chapters he thought he would have), he knew he would have enough. His final count for that book was 88,000 words.

He pitched his first book, and his publisher pitched the second. After his first book he wasn’t burning to do another; but now, after the second, he is burning. Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy did so well that he’s thinking he should strike while the iron’s hot – take advantage of the attention he’s gotten for the book.

Someone else asked if he ever had bad writing days while writing his books. He said that, since he had an outline, if he was having trouble writing, he would at least spit something out on the page; when he got his groove back, he could then shape what he’d written.

How to write a non-fiction book proposal

In my search for books on how to write a non-fiction book proposal, I came across 6 that I found helpful:

• How To Write a Book Proposal, by Michael Larsen
• Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody can Write, by Elizabeth Lyon
• The Fast Track Course on How to Write a Nonfiction Book Proposal, by Stephen Blake Mettee
• Write the Perfect Book Proposal: 10 That Sold and Why, by Jeff Herman and Deborah Levine Herman
• Guerilla Marketing for Writers: 100 Weapons to Help you Sell Your Work, by Jay Conrad Levinson, Rick Frishman, and Michael Larsen
• 1001 Ways to Market Your Books: For Authors and Publishers, by John Kremer

The first three are the basic ones that guide you through the process of writing a non-fiction book proposal. Lyon’s Nonfiction Book Proposals Anybody can Write does a lot of hand-holding, and walks you through the entire process. Larsen’s How to Write a Book Proposal is much more detailed, and he mentions more types of books than does Lyon. But the most useful book I found was Mettee’s The Fast Track Course on How to Write a Nonfiction Book Proposal, which is much shorter and more succinct. It starts with walking you through the query letter rather than the proposal itself, which I think would be a more efficient approach. I have all three books, and I would use Mettee’s first as a general guide, referring to Lyon’s and then Larsen’s if I needed more detail about a certain section.

Write the Perfect Book Proposal: 10 That Sold and Why is a great complement to the general guides above, as the authors include 10 successful proposals with extensive notes on their strengths and weaknesses, and plenty of tips. The specificity in this book is GREAT, and it gives you plenty of examples and many variations, making the instructions in the general guides much clearer. The first half of the book is a summary of a general guide, which I skipped. The gem of this book are the proposals, not the guide; use the first three books for that.

The last two books on marketing are also useful, since non-fiction writers are now expected to do most of their own marketing and to ideally have a “platform” (be in the public eye and have authority on your subject). Guerrilla Marketing for Writers: 100 Weapons to Help You Sell Your Work is the one I highly recommend, as it’s geared to writers and is just plain FUN. Full of quick tips and great ideas, it also offers the cost for each idea, and most ideas are free or cheap.

The final book, 1001 Ways to Market Your Books: For Authors and Publishers was my least favourite, but still quite useful. It’s a huge reference book of marketing ideas. Once an author has a published book, I would definitely recommend buying this as a reference guide. But I tried to sit down and read it from cover to cover — BAD IDEA. It truly is a thumb-through reference guide and not meant for full-scale reading. I found it boring and dry, and found the “voice” confusing (until I realize that, in the first section, the author is talking to publishers, not writers; this is why I like Guerilla Marketing better – they’re talking to me!) It is full of great marketing tips (moreso if you’re a publisher), but the book is so huge it was hard to find the ones that would be useful to me without being overwhelmed. Overall, while I’d recommend the first 5 books, I would not recommend this one. The Guerilla guide will give you enough ideas for your proposal; once you sell your book, then definitely check this one out.

The problem with any marketing book, of course, is that its information about internet marketing is going to be out-of-date by the time it’s published. These both are lacking a lot of material when it comes to current online marketing, so be sure to supplement these with something else. There is definitely a market for an up-to-date guide to emarketing (one that is consistently kept updated). I know of one ebook that’s out there, but it’s a couple of years old now. And I’ve seen many articles about aspects of emarketing, but I’d like a straight-forward how-to guide that includes everything. If you know of one, please let me know!

Review: Every Secret Thing (memoir)

It’s taken me a while to write a review of this book – I think I love it so much my review can’t possibly live up to the book. For a description of the book’s plot and relevant reader comments, check out amazon.co.uk (not .com). Essentially, Gillian Slovo is the daughter of two white anti-apartheid activists, and Gillian and her sisters took a backseat to their parents’ political activism while they were growing up. Gillian traces the story of their parents’ political activities with extensive research and weaves in her own personal experiences.

Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country gets top marks from me on being a fascinating book, as well as being a well-crafted story. Slovo’s writing is wonderful – light, clear, vivid. She weaves a political history – and an amazing amount of research – with her own life story very effectively. I admire many of the writing techniques she uses, from her deft use of research to her easy movement through time.

Relating to my own writing, Slovo’s way of moving through time really excites me, for it gives me permission (and a method) to do so in my own writing. Slovo sticks to a general chronology, but she will travel forward and backward through time with ease as is relevant to the theme she’s discussing. There are three sections: 1) 1982 when her mother was politically assassinated; 2) the back story of their lives up until that point; 3) the story after her mother’s assassination (including the fall of apartheid and Slovo’s search for her mother’s killer). If Slovo talks about an incident that will not come up again in the book, she will answer all questions then and there; if she mentions one of her parents’ (to use her word) comrades in, say, 1961, she’ll include a footnote to explain what happened to them later in life (usually a violent death at the hands of the South African state).

I love how she skips through time with such ease and yet it’s so clear to the reader! That takes skill. She uses such devices as “Years later I would interview someone who would clarify this issue…” and then transitions back to the main time frame by saying, “But that was still to come. In the meantime, I was still listening to so-and-so talk…”

I also like how she presented research in her story. She quotes from letters or refers to conversations she’s had about the situations, rather than just telling us the straightforward story that she has pieced together. She is being transparent about where she’s getting her information and is allowing the reader to judge how reliable the information is (which is especially important in situations where she’s gotten contradictory testimony from different sources). This also makes me want to include more references to “In my diary at the time, I wrote…” and such in my own writing. That adds a vividness and another dimension of truth and authenticity.

Here’s what she has to say about memory and time, that there’s no one Truth in memory: “I’d realized that memory, experience, interpretation could never be fixed or frozen into one, unchanging truth. They kept on moving, relentlessly metamorphosizing into something other so that the jagged edges of each fragment would never, ever slot together… The dead stayed dead, but the rest of us kept going. When we finally looked back, distance distorted what we saw.”

For the most part, Slovo does an excellent job of revealing how difficult it is for a child to understand why her parents aren’t there for her, awesome political struggle or not. A child doesn’t understand everything that’s going on and why, she just knows that her parents are gone (in jail, in exile, or even if home, constantly organizing and distant emotionally). I do think that adult Slovo could be a little more sympathetic to her parents’ plight as an adult looking back, now understanding what was at stake, but perhaps the childhood resentments ran too deep.

I love what Nelson Mandela said to the author at one point when she was an adult: “He told us how one day when he had gone to hug his grown-up daughter she had flinched away from him, and burst out, ‘You are the father to all our people, but you have never had the time to be a father to me.’ … This, he said, was his greatest, perhaps his only regret: the fact that his children, and the children of his comrades, had been the ones to pay the price of their parents’ commitment. …[A]s the state poured out its wrath, they had watched their children suffer. And yet, and yet — what else could they have done?” I think this captures perfectly the dilemma these activists and their children were in.

I have end with this amazing quote I found from Gillian Slovo’s father, Joe Slovo, written soon after WWII (note that the Slovos are Jewish):

“Within a few years the wars of consolidation and expansion began. Ironically enough, the horrors of the Holocaust became the rationalization for the preparation by Zionists of acts of genocide against the indigenous people of Palestine. Those of us who, in the years that were to follow, raised our voices publicly against the violent apartheid of the Israeli state were vilified by the Zionist press. It is ironic, too, that the Jew-haters in South Africa – those who worked and prayed for a Hitler victory – have been linked in close embrace with the rulers of Israel in a new axis based on racism.”

Traumatic Memoir

This explains so much!

[T]rauma-based accounts are often private salvage operations. Rather than assuming continuity, they must, at the deepest level, reflect and somehow compensate for its destruction. For a trauma is a rupture, a break … whether brought on by a single experience or, more commonly, the infliction of a repeated injury that cannot be integrated; the normal continuum of growth is violated. The impulse for expression is different at the very core. (p. 145)

It’s no stretch … to see the work of these memoirists as a purposefully undertaken repetition, the goal being comprehension and exorcism: psychological control… [T]he impulse to represent the overcoming of the wound. (p. 146)

The pain that leads to breakage is n ot only intense, it is very often situation based. Something happened–something explosive. The narrator’s assumptions about the world were shattered, bringing about collapse or some other severe reaction. Eventually–and the memoir itself, the writing of it, is a testament to this–some understanding or acceptance was achieved. (p. 146)

This is not a naive narrator. Her suffering has made her a philosopher, a student of fate, chance, and the complex us/them psychology of the outsider. (p. 171 about Lucy Grealey’s The Autobiography of a Face.)

On truth in memoir:

No one who reads memoir believes – how could they? – that exchanges happened exactly as set down,  or that key events have not been inflected to achieve the necessary effect. The question is only how much departure is tolerable and at what point does the modified recollection turn into fiction?

My own answer has always been that the memoirist writes from a subjective provocation, following an imperative to express the true dynamics of some part of the past. The distilled experience then exists as a specifically contoured shape, the stored sensation of “how it was.” This is what the memoirist seeks to reproduce. As the poet Stephane Mallarme insisted, “Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces. Exactly right. And in capturing the effect the need for accuracy is absolute. The writer must represent as faithfully as possible what memory has shaped inside–memory and feeling… Distortion is inevitable, permissible, so long as it is in service of the truth that overrides the literal sequence of events… This is not to say that some memorists might not steer in the directino of effect, to up the intensity or to confer a more pleasing outline. They ask: Who will ever know the difference? Here I would only say that honesty of tone is a hard-won quality and that good readers are highly sensitive to its nuances. A memoirist takes an enormous risk when she invents or distorts for effect. False emotions have a hollow sound, and while trust is easily shaken, it is very hard to regain. (pp. 142-143)

- From The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again, by Sven Birkets. Greywolf Press, 2008.