I’ve been attuned to the semi-mythical construction of “the reader.” Most of the essays mention this person: contact with them is the test for morality or memory—it sizzles, shines or burns only in their head. The Maia essay makes a…

Are all writers gorgons (Anolik) or monsters (White)? Sorry, all “real writers”? (White: “Would I do it over again? Yes, since it is one of my strongest pieces of writing—and that’s the kind of monster every real writer is.”) What…

The Ethics of MemoirThere is no disagreement with Eakins 1st rule. It may not be as clear in application, however. Gornick says the reader must believe that the narrator is telling the truth. I’m guessing this means that total accuracy…

Reflecting on the short readings and the NPR audio assigned for the upcoming class, I’ve come to realize that memoir writing lives somewhere in the world of truth and imagination. How do we imagine the past? Our memory is more…

Gornick’s The Situation and the Story felt too invested in the primacy of the individual – as if writing doesn’t have much use for its medium other than its subservience to insight. Language, overflowing in connotative as well as denotative…

A “persona.” Sigh. For a minute, I understand what Gornick means…and then I don’t. I really liked her example of the diary she couldn’t use… and then could, realizing as she worked that she now “had a narrator on the…

The advice “Get the narrator, and you’ve got the piece” (123) struck me. I’ve read this book for two other courses, and it was interesting to re-read with a bit more experience. Last year, I resented Gornick’s tone when she…

I’ve read the Situation and the Story a few times now, and I always find Gornick’s clear definition of story helpful: “The story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come…

I am an apprentice in this field.  I must admit that I seem to know what Gornick was talking about; but, at the same time, I don’t think I really know what she was talking about.  I have a few…

Throughout most of The Situation and The Story, Vivian Gornick deftly tightropes the line between subjectivity and objectivity: she illuminates the subjectivities of the writers, their narrators, and their personas; she objectively finds quality in works by writers that she…