Writing

The Astronaut

Cathy LaGrow 9 Comments

Classification: memoir, non-fiction

Brother #1 came to visit last night. We were talking about books (he’d brought me yesterday’s New York Times Book Review) when he stopped and said, “Oh! I didn’t even know that Frank McCourt was dead. Did you know that?”

“What?” I said. “No, he’s not.”

“Yes, he is! It’s true.” My brother whipped out his iPhone and pulled up McCourt’s wiki page. “Look, right there.”

I pretended to disbelieve the information for another minute. How on earth did I miss that news? Then again, McCourt died in July of 2009, when I was still nursing my second baby. There isn’t a whole lot I remember from that time period.

After Angela’s Ashes (McCourt’s memoir) was published in 1996, even after all the hype and praise, even after the awards, I resisted reading the book for a long time. The main reason? When I picked it up at the store and flipped through it, I noticed that McCourt didn’t use quotation marks around the dialogue in the book.

Well, that’s ridiculous and confusing, I thought, and I set the book down and wandered away.

Eventually, sometime in the early 2000’s, I caved in and bought the book. Once I started reading it I couldn’t stop (and those missing quotation marks were no trouble at all.) When I finished the last page, I looked up and said to myself:

Stunning, stunning, stunning.

That is the most stunning book I’ve ever read.

That’s what I subsequently told anyone who would listen, and it may still be true, all these years later. If you haven’t read Angela’s Ashes, oh, you should.


Frank McCourt grew up in Ireland in the 1930’s, and his childhood defines the term “abject poverty.” His Father was a drunk who periodically abandoned the family; McCourt’s mother, Angela, was left to provide food and shelter for her four surviving children (three others died in infancy.) McCourt lived in places where the floors were covered in water throughout the cold winters, places where there was one outdoor toilet that was shared by the entire neighborhood and was never cleaned by anyone. He ate whatever food his mother could beg for – sometimes there was no food, and the children went hungry. He attended school wearing shoes that were patched together with rubber from bicycle tires, and was taught by Catholic masters who beat their small pupils whenever they felt like it.

The distinctive magic of McCourt’s writing is that it doesn’t contain a trace of self-pity, even when he’s describing the most awful events. His story should be too heartbreaking to read, but it isn’t, because McCourt infuses it with just enough gentle humor and hope.

Angela’s Ashes was so extraordinary, it earned McCourt a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and spent more than two years on international bestseller lists. McCourt went on to write two more bestselling memoirs, ‘Tis and Teacher Man.

Weeks ago, my brother sent me a quote from the TV show Mad Men, and before he even explained the context, I adored the words. “She was born in a barn and she died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.”

Frank McCourt grew up chasing rats from his crumbling home, battling typhoid and chronic conjunctivitis, and literally licking food grease off of newspaper pages when he got too hungry. He died as one of the most famous, feted, successful writers in the world.

Frank McCourt was an astronaut.

Writing that rocks – Rick Bragg

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

Classification: memoir, non-fiction

He writes more gorgeous sentences per capita than any writer I’ve ever read. For a while, after you finish one of his stories, most other writing seems flat and uninteresting (yes, even the good stuff.) Without having a college education, he became a long-time reporter for The New York Times, won a Pulitzer Prize (and more than 50 other writing awards), received a Nieman fellowship to Havard, and is now a professor at the University of Alabama.

His name is Rick Bragg, and words turn to pure magic in his hands, that’s all.

In 1999, after many successful years as a newspaper journalist, Bragg started publishing memoirs, mostly about his own rural Southern family – and the critics went nuts. Several things converge in these stories: he is deeply passionate about these people; his family tree is chock-full of the most colorful characters imaginable; and Rick Bragg is simply one of the best writers and storytellers alive.

After I read the first chapter of All Over but the Shoutin, I set the book in my lap, looked off into the distance, and thought to myself, “You have got to be kidding.” You know how great writers can sometimes craft sentences that are so beautiful, they seem to reach out of the page and shake you? And you stop and read those sentences a few times over, just for the joy of it? With Bragg, every single page is peppered with those kinds of sentences.

It’s no good trying to articulate what he does. So I’ll give you some of his own words. (This is the very end of the prologue to All Over but the Shoutin, a book that is sort of a love letter to his mother):

No, this is not an important book. The people who know about books call it a memoir, but that is much too fancy a word for me, for her, for him. It is only a story of a handful of lives, in which one tall, blond woman, her back forever bent by the pull of that sack, comes off looking good and noble, and a dead man gets to answer for himself from deep in the ground. In these pages I will make the dead dance again with the living, not to get at any great truth, just a few little ones. It is still a damn hard thing to do, when you think about it.
God help me, Momma, if I am clumsy.

Incidentally, I met Rick Bragg at the public library in Salem, Oregon, on a rainy evening in early 2006 when I was very pregnant with my first child. My brother and I sat in a medium-sized lecture hall and watched as a woman from the library escorted Bragg to the podium. He was taller than I’d expected, a brick of a man with floppy hair and a heavy leather jacket that he never took off. He seemed guarded, as famous people are.

Like many great wordsmiths, he was not overly eloquent in person – or maybe he was just tired. He gripped the podium with one hand and talked a bit about writing his previous books, and about his upcoming one (The Prince of Frogtown, which I am reading now.) After answering a few audience questions, he went into the hallway and sat at a folding table to sign books.

My brother bought a book and we stood in line. When we reached Bragg, I was too shy to say anything more than “Hi.” But my brother bent over the table, gestured to me and said, “My sister, here, told me that you are America’s greatest living writer.” (It’s true. I had said that.) Bragg looked at me and his mouth turned up a bit at one corner and he joked, “Well, then, I’ll have to put your baby through college.” He scribbled his signature and we said goodbye and walked down the hall and out the door.

Sometimes I wish I could go back in time, to redeem that moment by saying something more than “Hi.” But how do you convey to someone, in thirty seconds, what a monstrous talent they have; and what’s the point? Surely they know it. Surely, when you reach a certain level of success, all strangers look like fawning sycophants.

If I had a do-over, though, I think I would tell him that his writing is beyond beautiful, and that reading it is a pleasure and a privilege. (And maybe, if I was bold, I would also ask him if those unearthly sentences flow out of him easily, or if he has to wrestle the words onto the page. But then, what if he didn’t give the answer I’d prefer?)

Do yourself a favor. Read his family trilogy, starting with All Over but the Shoutin or, if you prefer, Ava’s Man (a book about Bragg’s maternal grandfather.) Finish up with The Prince of Frogtown.

It’ll be some of the best few hours you will ever spend reading.

Writing that rocks – Stephen King

Cathy LaGrow 12 Comments

(In two parts, for those of you who don’t have all day.)

PART ONE

Confession: I have been a HUGE fan of Stephen King’s work for many years.
Confession: I read my first and only Stephen King novel about six months ago.

Why yes, I’d be happy to explain.

For a long time, there were only three genres of fiction that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. 1. Science Fiction, for no good reason (and, as we’ve already seen, I’ve overcome that aversion.) 2. “Bodice Rippers,” as I believe they’re called – I read one once, just to see, and it was not a successful experiment. And 3. Horror, because I am too easily scared, and I don’t like gore.

Like everyone else on Planet Earth, I was well aware of Stephen King, and had actually enjoyed the movie treatments of some of his famous novels (although I had to close my eyes in parts.) I knew he was one of the best-selling fiction writers of all time, with upwards of 350 million books sold. I also knew he had written a few non-horror novels – but I wasn’t interested in reading those. If I couldn’t sample what he obviously did best, then I didn’t want to sample him at all.

Then, in 2000, King went and wrote a little something that he called On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.

When On Writing was published, book critics, most of whom had long treated King’s work with either disdain or indifference, sort of collectively shuffled their feet. Because the book was…um…really good. As in, people were saying it was the best book on writing since The Elements of Style. Which was a bit outrageous.

And also, true.

The simple fact is, Stephen King has managed to sell several hundred million books, in a niche genre that is not even liked by anyone I know, because the man knows how to tell a freaking story (and I would use stronger language, but there are children around) better than just about anyone. This was evident to me before I had read a single word of his fiction. This was evident when I read his amazing memoir/guidebook.

On Writing contains a short (less than 100 pages) account of King’s childhood and early writing history. He then tells you everything he knows about writing. (In a postscript, he also writes about the 1999 accident that took place while he was writing this book, in which he was nearly killed by a runaway van while he was walking near his home.)

King touches on philosophical advice, as when he describes how he eventually traded in the massive writing desk he’d always dreamed of for a smaller one, so his kids would have space to come hang out in his office. He writes:

It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.

And King packs his book with practical advice, much of it echoing The Elements of Style (which he references.) He hates adverbs. He doesn’t believe in dressing up your vocabulary, or lecturing while writing, or forcing your characters to do things your way. He does believe in trimming the fat from your writing; if a stretch of narrative does not move the story along, no matter how beautiful it is – it must go. He hammers this point home wonderfully, as here:

It’s also important to remember it’s not about the setting, anyway – it’s about the story, and it’s always about the story. It will not behoove me (or you) to wander off into thickets of description just because it would be easy to do so.

On Writing has an easy, conversational tone to it that makes it sound like you’re talking to your Uncle Stevie (as King often refers to himself.) DO NOT BE FOOLED. Producing his kind of writing is in no way easy. It is one of the hardest things in the world to get right – and the only reason King can do it, as he oh so casually relates in the book, is that he has written his fingers to the bone since he was a child. He wrote his way through grade school, and high school, and college; he wrote in the laundry room of a double-wide, far into the night, every night; he wrote through addictions that were so bad, he can barely remember writing some of his books; he wrote his way back from the brink of death, in a variety of ways; he wrote when no one would pay him for it and when his first four completely-finished novels all went into the permanent reject heap. He writes because (I suspect) for him, to stop writing would be to stop breathing. King has natural talent, absolutely. But he has also worked at his profession as hard as anyone ever has. He has paid his dues, and then some.

Check out the list of books and stories he has published, from his web page (and then come back.) When I scrolled through this list, I got the strong urge to giggle, because the quantity of work he’s produced is insane. And bear in mind, he was writing long, long before he was ever published.

Anyway, by halfway through On Writing, I was a die-hard Stephen King fan.

Then in 2007, King was chosen as the guest editor for that year’s Best American Short Stories compilation. (This is a marvelous series in which every year, a different distinguished author selects the 20 or so best short stories from the most prestigious American magazines, and they are re-printed in a paperback book.) I bought the book and eagerly read Stephen’s choices, and I loved every one them, even though they all bore a slightly macabre King stamp. My opinion was cemented – Stephen King simply knows great writing. After that, I found and purchased another of his books on writing that my brother had told me about, the little known, out-of-print Secret Windows, which was published in 2000 as a Book-of-the-Month Club collection of essays, interviews, and articles.


PART TWO

By this point, there was no way I could continue to avoid King’s fiction. I had to read one of his novels. And I wanted it to be one of his best.

In late 2009, King published the 1074-page Under the Dome. I have always found it hard to resist the siren song of a Really Big Book, and I sensed that this novel would be my first foray into King fiction territory. The New York Times book review clinched it – the review begins with these words: “Under the Dome gravely threatens Stephen King’s status as a mere chart-busting pop cultural phenomenon. It has the scope and flavor of literary Americana, even if Mr. King’s particular patch of American turf is located smack in the middle of the Twilight Zone.”

A few months later, I checked out Under the Dome from my local library. Our state was having a streak of beautiful, warm weather last Spring, and in the afternoons, while my boys napped, I sat in the sun and read King’s book. And could not put it down.

King would probably be the first person to tell you that he is not the greatest writer alive. But he is far and away the best I’ve ever read at one thing: keeping the reader turning the pages. Under the Dome is, as I’ve mentioned, 1074 pages long – and if there was a dull page in that book, I never found it. I cannot tell you how much that blows my mind. It should be impossible to write 1000+ consecutive pages, and not get mired down in a bit of rambling. But I did not run across a single page where I thought, Oh, this would be a good place to take a break and go make myself a turkey sandwich, or put the clothes in the dryer.

That, my friends, is genius. And that is someone who has faithfully toiled away at his craft for untold hours, spanning untold years. Of course, one could credibly argue that King has an advantage over most writers, in that he deals with the supernatural. Since anything can (and does) happen to his characters, there is always some fantastic or unbelievable event going on, which creates tension and keeps the story moving forward briskly. But 1000 pages? In which the story never flags? That is the product of remarkable self-editing, and an incredibly finely-tuned ear.

(I won’t explain the plot of Under the Dome. If you’re not going to read the book, the plot doesn’t matter. If you can stomach some gore, then read the book – but I must mention: King’s writing is NOT for the faint of heart. Evidently, there is no subject that he considers taboo, and I mean NO subject. You have been warned.)

As much as I enjoyed that novel, I don’t plan to read any more King fiction. I do better when I don’t fill my head with dark and scary stuff. But I will go on being a big fan, from afar. If I ever publish a book (could happen), and Stephen King were to read it (never gonna happen), his approval would mean more to me than just about anyone else’s. Because he knows, better than anyone, what makes a great story.

Long live (and write) the King.

Writing that rocks – E.B. White

Cathy LaGrow 2 Comments

Classification: Letters, non-fiction

For the last several months, I have been working my way through Letters of E.B. White – “working” only in the sense that the book is 660 pages long, and (as I may have previously mentioned) I have two small boys to chase after. In every other sense, reading this book is the absolute opposite of a chore. People just do not write like White any more, and that’s a pity.

E.B. White is, of course, one of the grand-daddies of American literature. He is most famous for penning his children’s classics: Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan. (We owned copies of each of these books when I was a child, and I wore them out.) White also contributed to the prestigious The New Yorker magazine for roughly 60 years, and he co-authored a little book that has become the “bible” for writers – The Elements of Style (it is also commonly called “Strunk & White,” after its authors.)

The Elements of Style should be required reading for would-be writers (and you need your own copy, because you’ll be highlighting and underlining, and writing in the margins.) The book covers grammar and word usage, but it also explains principles of style and composition, giving such golden instructions as “Omit needless words.” Messrs. Strunk and White believed in making writing as clear and concise as possible, by slashing all extraneous words from one’s prose, and I cannot tell you how often that chant echoes through my head (“Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”) Whenever I obey, my writing becomes better. (An example, from the book: “He is a man who” can be simply written as “he,” without losing any of the meaning – and with a savings of four words!)

Back to Letters of E.B. White. I found this thick book at my favorite used bookstore, and it is just about the best $2.00 I have ever spent. White never wrote an autobiography; instead, in 1976, he collected and published this book of his life-long personal correspondence. Letter compilations often make great memoirs – IF the author is a talented and prolific writer – because people tend not to self-censor when they’re writing personal letters, and also because you are reading details and feelings exactly as they happened, not as they were remembered decades after the fact. I’m afraid this kind of book is a dying breed. No one writes letters by hand any more – certainly not to the tune of hundreds or thousands of them.

Letters of E.B. White begins with a few childhood letters, but the collection really “kicks in” after college, when White and a friend hit the open road in a model-T, in 1922. While driving across the country (working odd jobs when he needed to), White wrote long letters home, to friends and family. At 23 years old, White had not yet developed the beautiful conciseness he would later display, but his writing skills were already impressive. Portions of his letters are so descriptive, they actually sound like great fiction.

Once White had married, he settled into life on a farm in Maine, and he enjoyed puttering around with his animals almost more than he enjoyed writing. (One has only to refer to the subjects of his children’s books, to see how fond he was of small creatures.) Although White was always courted by the most elite literary publications in New York City, he seemed constantly on the verge of giving up writing jobs altogether, in order to devote more time to his country pursuits, and his descriptions of early 20th-century rural life are charming.

White was a gentleman, as men of that era were, and his writing was elegant, but he also had a marvelously droll sense of humor that really made his words sparkle. He was self-deprecating without sounding either grouchy or cynical. You cannot teach that kind of clever wit, and you can’t fake it.

Two years after publishing his book of letters, White won an honorary Pulitzer for his lifetime of work (he had previously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.)

Reading through White’s letters is like having a chat with a delightful companion, and it’s an excellent way to spend a warm summer evening, with a cool drink in hand. Or a crisp Fall morning, with a steaming cup of coffee in hand. Or a rainy afternoon, with an afghan over your lap and a fire crackling next to you. Okay, yes. I find reading to be a lovely and appropriate way to pass any time of day, in any season. And if you couldn’t relate, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog in the first place.

I raise my coffee mug to you.

Writing that rocks – The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Cathy LaGrow 4 Comments

Classification: Fiction

Is there anything better than being delightfully surprised by a book that you weren’t expecting to like?

I had never heard of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society when I picked up a paperback copy of the novel last spring, from the display table at my favorite used bookstore. The title nearly put me off – it sounds so silly, worse than The Friday Night Knitting Club (which I had also recently read, and about which I will not be posting.) Also, the book has two authors – Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows – which is often a red flag for clunkiness.

I read the “critical acclaim” blurbs on the covers and the first few pages, and they were very good. What clinched it, for me, was a front cover blurb by Elizabeth Gilbert, in which she said “Treat yourself to this book, please…” I had recently read Eat, Pray, Love by Gilbert, and since her own writing is superb, I figured she knew what she was talking about. After dithering for only a few minutes, I bought the book.

The entire story is told in the form of letters written from various characters to other characters. There are no editorial explanations, other than a notation at the top of each letter, stating whom the letter was from, and to. This tactic could easily have become gimmicky, or worse, it could have made the narrative sound choppy or confusing. None of these things happened, thanks to the beauty and strength of the writing.

The book, published in 2008, is set in 1946 – but it sounds timeless, not dated.
(It is also one of the very few “squeaky-clean” novels I will be recommending. Approved for all audiences.) It is, at heart, a love story, filled with witty people I wish I knew – by the end of the book, they don’t seem fictional.

Nutshell: the main character, Juliet, a writer who lives in England, becomes pen pals with a man who belongs to a reading group on the small island of Guernsey. He first writes to her because he has acquired a book that once belonged to her (her name and address are penciled inside) – it is a collection of essays by an author they both admire. Juliet, who is searching for a topic for her next book, begins corresponding with him and with several members of his reading group. Eventually, she visits the island for an extended period of time.

The book is light-hearted and fun – sort of like a literary beach-read. What I cannot get over, is how much technical skill the authors displayed. Imagine how tricky it would be to develop all sorts of diverse characters without using the editorializing of either a first-person or third-person narrator. When you create an entire story using fictional letters, you have to describe people and actions with extreme subtlety. The moment you start abusing the system, by trying to cram in extra description that you just really need the reader to know, it will blare out like a foghorn. There’s a reason more writers don’t try to use this format – it’s dang hard.

The poignant back-story of the book is explained in an Afterward. The main author, Mary Ann Shaffer, fell ill and died just before the book was published, so she never got to see the wide acclaim it received. This was her first book. Her niece, Annie Barrows, did the final rewrites on the book, when Mary Ann was too sick to finish. Whatever work the niece did, it fits in seamlessly.

I honestly can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t like this book. I’m sure they exist, I just can’t come up with any, off the top of my head. The story, and the people in it, are simply that charming.

The death of Mary Ann Shaffer is our loss; I would have very much liked to read other work by her. Instead, we are left with this nearly perfect little novel. I guess that’s not a bad legacy to have.