reading entry 9/5/08

it does seem to be true that once you start looking for this stuff, it’s everywhere.

just a few examples that have grabbed me: a short New Yorker piece about Erica Jong in which her sister took over a writer’s event to complain about the way she (the sister) and her husband were portrayed in Fear of Flying… that even when it’s fiction, if the central character is clearly based on the author, people are likely to make assumptions about the identity and real-life behaviour of secondary characters.

The Australian Literary Review, 7/5/08, Tim Parks on Julian Barnes and the way he weaves his biography into a discussion of what it means to die…and Luke Davies’ review of a book by Kathleen Stewart, of whom I’d never heard but now must chase down; Davies analyses how the awful childhood revealed in the new (autobiographical) book, The After Life, fed into the emotional tones and themes of Stewarts’ previous fictions. This is life writing as a kind of key to the fiction, I guess.

And Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, a how-to-write book a friend passed on to me…seems to be aimed at pretty much complete beginners with writer’s block, and is quite emphatic about examining memory, writing on personal matters and events…I haven’t finished it yet so I can’t say if it really shows how the detailed description of, say, school lunches, can be useful in creating fiction.