Category: Autobiography

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Call for Submissions: “CNF Conversations”

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I’d like to start a new section here called “CNF Conversations.” (CNF stands for Creative Nonfiction). I propose to do post shortish interviews with authors of recently published works of creative nonfiction: biographies, autobiographies, memoir, collections of essays, mixed genre, and whatever else, as long as it’s nonfiction.

I’m looking for fine writing.

To get a better idea of the sorts of texts that might fit the bill, please browse the “Life-blood” category.

If you are a writer of nonfiction and have a recent book about which you’d like me to consider chatting with you (by email), please get in touch through the Contact page.

[Photo: Göran Johansson]

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The Right to Write, or Whose Story is This Anyway?

I’ve finally started writing my new book, Siberian Time, in earnest. It will tell the story of my grandmother’s 17-year exile to Siberia. Inevitably, too, it will tell stories about my family members: my father, his sisters, my cousins, my grandfather.

Because my chosen forms are the personal essay and creative nonfiction, I almost always appear in my work. Often too, there are traces of my husband and son, simply because they’re always around, and life with them colours everything I write and do. But until now, the prism of my life has been a tool for bringing someone else’s story into focus. My life, and that of my family, have never been at the centre of a project.

Until now.

So, I’ve just finished writing a lengthy essay about my 2010 trip to Siberia, when I travelled for four days by train across Russia to find the village where my grandmother was forcibly exiled. My cousin Darius came with me, and turned out to be the perfect companion. Before leaving, I warned him (with a laugh, but nevertheless deadly serious) that he would inevitably end up in my book, and he assured me that this was cool with him. Little did he suspect that my first piece of real writing stemming from our trip would be all about him.

For a long time I blamed the wound of my grandmother’s exile for the premature deaths of two of her three children. My father died suddenly of a heart attack when I was eighteen, and his sister (Darius’s mother) died of cancer about four years later. But only after returning from Siberia did I start really to wonder how my grandmother herself survived. Though it wasn’t so much about Siberia that I wondered, but Canada.

My grandmother arrived in this country in 1966, reuniting with her children after 24 years of separation. The six-year-old boy she’d left in Lithuania (my father) was balding, married and approaching middle age the next time she saw him.

The piece I’ve just finished asks the question: How do you survive when faced with incontrovertible evidence that life has passed you by? My answer: my cousin Darius. I explore the idea that he was her second chance.

My essay (currently titled “Trans-Siberia: Like Birds Returning Home”) narrates some painful memories that my cousin, who was in large part raised by our grandmother, shared with me on the train to Siberia. It also tells of our trip and of what we learned. Once I finished, I was pleased with my resulting text, but worried that I’d overstepped a line of privacy. The memories I used in my writing were not mine, and I felt I needed to ask permission before putting them out in the world.

So, I braced myself, and sent the text to Darius.

His response has been beyond encouraging. My cousin wisely counsels me to continue on, not to censor myself, and to be fearless. Nonetheless, I still feel a bit of uneasiness, and maybe that’s not so bad.

I recently reviewed Stephen Elliott’s memoir The Adderall Diaries. In it he states that he doesn’t seek approval from those he writes about. And though I absolutely understand why he wouldn’t, and don’t disapprove, I nonetheless continue to feel a responsibility to those whose memories I use. I’m not sure how much vetting I’m prepared to invite or allow as the book progresses. You can’t please everyone, true, but to what extent are we answerable to those whose lives intersect with what we write? For me, this remains an urgent question.

I’d love to hear about others’ experiences in this area. Have you written something using others’ memories or experiences? Did you allow for vetting or approval? Did you suffer a backlash? What is the biographer’s or memoirist’s responsibility to the lives she borrows for her work?

(NB: My essay is still a draft and destined for an anthology about exile. I’ve given it to a trusted friend for feedback, and will announce its appearance in print once that happens.)

[Photo: supercanard]

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Life-blood: Stephen Elliott

Stephen Elliott, The Adderall Diairies: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder (Graywolf Press, 2009).

“. . . only a fool mistakes memory for fact” — Stephen Elliott, in the disclaimer to his memoir.

I decided to buy this book after I heard its author speak at the AWP writers’ conference in Washington. He stood up in a t-shirt that showed off his tattooed arms and, with charming and self-deprecating humor, offered some really good insights into the mechanics of writing. If nothing else, this guy had charisma. I wanted to know more, so I ordered The Adderall Diaries. I’m glad I did.

It’s a hard book to summarize: the stitch that holds it all together is an exploration of ambiguous confession.

Elliott starts the book: “My father may have killed a man.” He learns this after reading an unpublished memoir that his father (a failed writer) sends him. He then goes on a hunt to determine the truth of the confession, combing newspapers, checking county death registries, and so on. The search is inconclusive.

This first curious confession reproduces itself, but in slightly different form, when a casual acquaintance of Elliott’s confesses to having killed “eight and a half” people, the last of whom he claims was his lover Nina. Though most of the supposed victims of this would-be serial murder can be accounted for (his confessions are false), Nina is indeed missing. Her husband, not the would-be serial murderer who confessed to her murder, is charged with killing her. Elliott follows the trial of Hans Reiser, and we follow him doing so.

This is where it gets really interesting.

I once heard Michael Chabon (of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) say in an interview that he knew he was on to something good when it made him feel uncomfortable. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, as I work on my third book, and try to find the courage to tell some truths and find the edge of what I’m comfortable with. Elliott, for one, has gone to the edge of comfort and often goes beyond it.

Now, the murder confession is but a framing device in this book. More than true crime, it resembles a journey through Stephen Elliott’s mind and his past: addiction, overdose, homelessness, petty crime, suicide attempts, masochistic sex, gogo dancing, familial loss and estrangement, and, finally, a coming to writing.

In the end, the book itself constitutes a way out of pain for its author, but is by no means a cure: “I hear doors open but can’t see them. I move forward without a path. I am not sad all the time but I will always be sad sometimes. [. . .] Neat conclusions do nothing for me. I write to make sense, to communicate, to connect” (198).

Given the subject matter (murder, sadomasochism, addiction), a reader might be forgiven for expecting an icky memoir that tells too much, perpetuates voyeurism, and titillates through disturbing imagery. But this is not at all what I found.

Stephen Elliott’s book impressed me on so many levels. The writing, first of all, is superb. It’s simple and clipped and economical, so that when he describes harrowing scenes of suffering (mostly his own), there is no melodrama or self-pity. Where sex is concerned, the tone is frank, the details sparing. He manages to give insight into the dynamics and emotional payoff of S/M where the narrative necessitates, and then he moves on.

Perhaps most surprisingly, I found Elliott’s portrayal of women amazingly complex and affection-filled. This is rare in a book that explores (if peripherally) sexual power relations, and I suspect that it’s successful in its portrayal of women because Elliott has thought more carefully about sexual dynamics than most. In a scene towards the end of the book, the author’s father mockingly suggests that a woman walking by on the street might make a good dominatrix for his son. It’s a moment that we could pass over without comment from the author. Women, after all, are judged and denigrated and sexualized in public like this every day. But Elliott corrects his father, saying that dominant women rarely look dominant. There is more to most of us, he stresses, than meets the eye.

Elliott’s book ends on a quasi-hopeful note, but the message here is that life and writing are a process. In the final pages, he is still snorting Adderall (speed), if less than before, and his S/M continues. Both ostensibly help him write (and live), so it’s hard to distinguish his poison from its antidote.

Maybe that’s the point. Or one of them, anyway.

Ultimately, Elliott’s book is about survival, getting better, getting worse, keeping going, and about lies, truth, and how the two can sometimes be indistinguishable. It’s about writing as a life practice and healing mechanism. Importantly, it also proves that even the most confessional text can be art.

I found this book hard to put down.

You might too.

Try it.

[Photo: hipsxxhearts]

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Life-blood: WG Sebald

WG Sebald, The Emigrants (New Directions, 1996 [English translation]).

And the last remnants memory destroys
— Epigraph to Chapter One


I read this book over several months, putting it down then picking it up again weeks later. It’s a meandering and meditative text that gestures toward a point about memory, pain, and shame, rather than declaring it outright and obviously. Maybe my reading of it mirrored its style, wandering as I did. And even though I finished The Emigrants a while ago, I’ve had a hard time finding a way to sit down and write a quick account of it.

This is because Sebald’s work defies summary, genre, and the very categories of fiction and nonfiction.

I read Sebald, a longtime professor of literature and translation in Norwich, England, for the first time when I lived in Cincinnati some eight years ago. At the time, I was finishing up the writing of my first book, in which I’d been experimenting with various techniques in a nonfiction text, and I was fearful and uneasy about what I’d written.

It must have been my husband who bought Sebald’s Austerlitz: he’s always been more in tune with new veins in writing than I, but often has less patience for narrative, and tends to read prefer philosophy and criticism. So, even though Sean never finished Austerlitz, I gobbled it up. The book landed on my bedside table at exactly the right time, just when I needed someone to confirm that my own instincts on experimenting in nonfiction were valid. Sebald did that and more.

For me, Sebald was a revelation and a revolution.

The Emigrants, Sebald’s first book that appeared in English translation (he wrote in German), examines the lives of four individuals (Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth, and Max Ferber) who, like the author (born in Germany in 1944), left their German or Germanized homes. In doing so, they, like their author, become strangers in the world.

The narrative’s characters are quirky and tragic, and through his interactions with them or their memories, and in his tracing of their paths through emigration, Sebald examines broader questions of foreignness and belonging, memory and shame, despair and adaptation, and of what remains of the old once a new home has been adopted.

World War II and the Holocaust return as constant themes in Sebald’s work. But while Austerlitz examines the Kindertransport, whereby many thousands of unaccompanied Jewish children were brought to England from Prague, and thus survived, the war and its horrors are a more oblique presence in The Emigrants.

There is the German-Jewish character of Max Ferber, that of Henry Selwyn whose roots lie in Lithuania, and the almost passing references to the dead who lost their lives in Nazi camps, but questions of Jewishness, of anti-Semitism, collaboration, or perpetration remain under the surface like an ache.

For the emigrants of his book, as for the author himself, home has become a problem and a memory. Permanently on the move, forever displaced, and no longer at ease anywhere (Sebald once said that his ideal post would be at a hotel in Switzerland), both the author and his characters embody rootlessness and restlessness.

Sebald started writing in his signature melancholy, calm voice late in life: only in his forties. And like so many greats, he was taken far too early. He died in 2001 in a car accident at the age of 57.

If you don’t know his work, I highly recommend it. Perhaps it will prove revelatory for you as well.

[Photo: cavale]

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Life-blood: Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon, The Shadow Man: A Daughter’s Search for her Father (Bloomsbury, 1997 [1996]).

I read this book on the recommendation of a colleague who thought it could be useful to my work. She was right: I found that it spoke to me on many levels.

I hadn’t expected to have so much in common with Mary Gordon.

Gordon’s book tells the story of her attempt to reconstruct her father’s life and identity through visits to archives and libraries, by wading through murky memories, and taking by both real and imaginary voyages.

She tells us that she connected to her father first and foremost through writing, and that she had become a writer because of him. But her daughterly love and pride get disturbed when she begins to learn unanticipated truths: that her father was both a Lithuanian Jew (who converted to Catholicism) and an anti-Semite, not an American-born, Harvard-educated once-married Catholic, as she had been told. Though he had indeed been a writer, his texts reveal he was not a very good one. His life revealed that he was not a very good husband. Certainly not a very good Jew.

This is a very honest book, so much so that at times it made me uncomfortable. As I read one bald truth after another, I wondered where Gordon got the courage to reveal so much about the things her father believed, about the lies he told, about family secrets. I wondered whom this book was for and who would care.

But just as I asked the question, I began to care about this family. This moment coincided with the author’s offering up of a portrait of her mother: a woman crippled by polio in childhood and struck by senility late in life Gordon’s discussions of her mother’s body struck me as particularly poignant:

For many years, the only adult female body I saw unclothed was, it must be said, grotesque, lopsided, with one dwarf leg and foot and a belly with a huge scar, biting into and discoloring unfirm flesh. She’d point to it and say, “This is what happened when I had you.” (221)

This mother is a phantom presence throughout the book (a shadow woman of sorts), the third member of the family, overlooked and largely unloved. But with her introduction, the narrative somehow fell into place for me, and the book began to sing, if sadly.

It was then that I started to find all sorts of common threads between my own life and work and Mary Gordon’s.  I began thinking about my own Lithuanian father who died too young, about my posthumous discoveries about his life, about my own processes of reconciliation with the dead, my relationship to Catholicism, to the country my parents left behind as children, and — most unexpectedly — about my relationship to my own mother and her poor body, battered by multiple sclerosis.

I read this book as I was starting to map out the first chapters of my current project, a family history of sorts. Gordon’s baldness forced me to ask: How much do I dare to tell? How much do I have the right to reveal? What do my parents’ stories have to do with the story of my grandmother that I’m writing?

Mary Gordon’s book is, at least in part, about learning to love someone with all their faults. It’s about forgiveness and acceptance, but without being too pretty or tidy. And (something that surprised me), it managed to speak to me on a most fundamental level by reflecting back my own story of intimacy, familiarity, and discomfort.

[Photo: Thomas Hawk]

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New essay on writing and mothering: Pregnant Pause

A while ago I wrote a post on failure and returning to the first-person voice. I told how I’d worked on an essay that got rejected countless times before it found its form and its home.

That essay has now appeared in the journal Feminist Formations, in an issue about the body.

Called “Pregnant Pause: On Ona Šimaitė, Research, Writing, and Motherhood,” my essay explores the riddle of being a writer and a mother. It’s a love story between a writer, her new baby and her biographical subject (a Holocaust rescuer and librarian).

You can read the essay here. 

If you don’t have access to Project Muse and would like a copy of the essay, feel free to send me a note via my Contact page, and I’ll get a PDF version off to you.

[Photo: Shutter Daddy]

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Life-blood: Patrick Madden


Patrick Madden, Quotidiana. University of Nebraska Press, 2010.

I started reading Quotidiana because I liked the title and because I’ve recently discovered how much I love the essay form. Good essays take the small, apparently throwaway details of everyday life and find in them universal truths and occasionally devastating beauty. Joan Didion is one master of the form, Phillip Lopate, another. Even Walter Benjamin worked in this vein through his examinations of Paris detritus, and of how his library mapped out his life.

It is their tradition in which Patrick Madden writes: “During my first extended encounters with the essay, I was struck (dumbstruck, moonstruck) by those authors who wrote from seemingly insignificant, overlooked, transient things, experiences, and ideas, who were able to find within their everyday, unexceptional lives inspiration for essaying” (2).

Quotidiana is about everyday things. In his essays, Madden examines love, family, fruit, garlic, physics, spirituality, foreignness, music, writing, sickness, teaching and raising children. My favourites are “Laughter” (that starts with a description of his baby daughter’s giggle at dancing sunlight) and “Ego Vici Mundum” that, using a visit to Buenos Aires’ Cathedral, ends up taking the reader almost accidentally through the history of Argentinean repression, the disappeared and the untiring activism of victims’ grandmothers. It’s a very, very good essay.

Themes that return again and again are the band Rush (whose music drifted up from my brother’s basement while I was growing up), life in Uruguay, the name Patrick and how it repeats itself and multiplies in Madden’s family, and (a current obsession of mine) Mormonism — Madden is a Mormon convert, and writes frankly and openly about the two years he spent as a missionary in South America.

Every essay in the book thinks about what the essay is and what the essay does, and the ways it can be simultaneously big and small, lyrical and mathematical.

When I read that while still a student, this author had been warned by a professor to switch from essays to fiction, since he would soon run out of material to write about, I scoffed (as apparently did Madden).

Truth is, anyone who lives life every day will always have something to write about. You just have to pay attention.

That’s the point of the essay.

And that’s the point of Quotidiana.

You can learn more about Patrick Madden at his site (whose URL acquisition he writes about in his book) at http://quotidiana.org/.

[Photo: Elizabeth Anne Photography]

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Globe and Mail essay: “My link to the past is gone”

Today, my essay about my maternal grandmother appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper. It’s a text I started a few months ago, while she was still alive.

For years, even decades, my grandmother barely aged. My mother and I marvelled at how well she was doing, and celebrated each birthday as a gift.

But after age 95 or so, she seemed to grow old at an accelerated pace.

A few months ago, it became clear that she was starting her exit. Her body was tired, and we knew death was not far off.

That’s when I started writing about her.

Originally, the essay was supposed about a kind of anticipation of mourning or grieving in advance. But with her death, it became an elegy. The Globe piece is a slightly shorter, tighter version of a text called “Blessings from Venus” that I read at her funeral.

My grandmother, Veronika (Verutė) Kubilius, died on June 10, 2010. Had she lived to September 4, 2010 she would have been 99 years old.

You can read the essay here.

[Photo of Veronika Kubilius ca. 2009 by Julija Šukys]

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Life-blood: Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Random House, 1994.

Perhaps you know this book already. If you’re a writer, chances are it’s been recommended to you, or you’ve come across it on lists of good books on writing. I know this, because it’s been on my horizon for years. I finally decided to familiarize myself.

I read my tattered second-hand copy this week while navigating through contract negotiations for my second book. (Because of this, Lamott’s description of a New Yorker cartoon struck me as particularly funny: “We’re still pretty far apart,” says a writerly type to a ‘normal’ person at party. “I’m looking for a six-figure advance, and they’re refusing to read the manuscript” [162].) I’m happy to report that negotiations have gone well.

But reading the book on the heels of completing a major project has allowed me to bounce Lamott’s description of the writing process against what I’ve just lived.

Even though she most often appears to be addressing relatively green and unpublished writers, I found many echoes of my own solitude, frustration, demons and necessity of faith and discipline, as well as confirmations of  hunches about the need for truth, honesty and mining  your past for material. Someone recently told me that if I wanted to get published in a “real” magazine, I had to stop writing about myself and start writing about others. Lamott, it seems, would disagree, at least to a certain extent.

In some ways the book is a how-to manual. There are practical tips about how to organize your time (sit down and write every day, even if you feel like you have nothing to give), how to narrow your focus (to the size of a one-inch picture-frame) if overwhelmed, to listen carefully to the world around you (and take notes on index cards), have friends read your work, and write in letter form to loosen stubborn ideas.

In other ways, the book serves as a warning. Writing is hard work and for most authors it reaps few material rewards. Fame, fortune and even publication may remain beyond reach for many, but, Lamott stresses, “the literary life is the loveliest one possible. [. . .] One can find in writing a perfect focus for life. It offers challenge and delight and agony and commitment. We see our work as vocation, with the potential to be as rich and enlivening as the priesthood” (232).

This is a book writers recommend to other writers perhaps because it puts the act of writing (not publishing or book promotion) at its centre. It reminds of the dignity of our work, and reconfirms its importance to culture at large.

For Lamott, writing is a gift to her child, her father, a dying friend, and probably herself. And, for her, writers (despite what the character Julie of the film Julie and Julia might have us believe — “You’re not a writer unless someone publishes you,” was it?) are people who write.

[Photo: TalayehS]

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How I stopped resisting and returned to the first-person

I keep going back to that month I spent at the Banff Centre for the Arts almost four years ago. Never before had I been treated with such generosity and respect (one of the Literary Journalism program’s mentors jokingly warned us not to get used to it, since never again would we be treated this well). The resources were humbling: everything to foster creativity and work was provided. So when I couldn’t deliver the quality of text I’d set out to write during my tenure there, I felt deep humiliation.

But my failure at Banff ended up teaching me about what kind of writer I am. What’s more, that failed text has finally (finally!) transformed itself into something good.

I travelled to Alberta in the summer of 2006 to write a 10,000 word essay on a librarian who hid Jews in a Lithuanian university library during the Shoah. I had my story, my archival documents to cite, and my ideas about what form it should take: above all, I wanted to keep myself out of the essay and avoid using the first-person voice.

Since I had written my first book in a quirky first-person, I was determined to try something new. I wanted to write something “straight”: to tell a story that deserved to be told without mucking it up with theatrics or by inserting myself into the narrative. It seemed like a good plan, and I stuck to it. At the end of four weeks of painful essay extraction, I submitted my final product.

The essay was a disaster. Clunky and lifeless. Even I had to admit it, so once I came home, I kept working on it, wrestling with it and trying to diagnose the problem.

Only after hundreds of drafts over many months, and a grudging return to the first-person voice, did the text begin to work. The story found its traction and my central character (the librarian) gained colour.

Why? What is it about the first-person voice that is so powerful? And why are we so suspicious of it?

Years ago, I was thinking about pitching something to the Chicago Public Radio show This American Life, and looked at their website for guidelines. One line from their description of what makes a good story has stayed with me. It’s now gone from the site, but it went something like: “We look for stories that appear to be about one thing, but that are actually about another.”

This is what the first-person voice is best at.

It’s easy to sneer at the glut of memoirs of the past decade, and to discredit the genre as somehow dishonest or narcissistic, but autobiographical texts and personal essays that really work are always about something bigger than the person writing them.

The best first-person texts flirt with navel-gazing, but are redeemed by insight, artistry, self-criticism, and honesty. By telling a story about their own singular lives, skilled autobiographers and personal essayists inspire revelations. In other words, these texts not only reveal something about the person writing them, but also about the one reading them.

My Banff essay didn’t work when it was just about my librarian, and began to gel only when I found the something else it was really about. Ultimately, the essay came to tell a love story between a researcher and her subject, and the ways in which a pregnancy disrupts this imagined relationship. This story that appeared to be about a Holocaust rescuer was actually about writing and motherhood.

After more rejections than I care to admit to, the essay (now called “Pregnant Pause: On Ona Šimaitė, Research, Writing and Motherhood”) has found its home in a journal called Feminist Formations, formerly the National Women’s Studies Journal. It will appear very soon, in a matter of weeks. I’ll let you know when it happens.

If you’re interested in thinking more deeply about the first-person voice, or simply in reading some top-notch texts, take a look at Phillip Lopate’s edited volume, The Art of the Personal Essay. It’s a massive, brick-sized tome, and will keep you inspired and interested for years to come.

[Photo: DelosJ]

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