Contents:
Later, she elaborates on the lived experience she grew to cherish: I want all of it—all the things to do with living—and I want them to keep feeling messy and confusing and even sometimes boring. The carpool line and the backpacks and the light that fills the room in the building where I wait while the kids take piano lessons.
The sound of my extended family laughing downstairs. I was not prepared for the final passages of each breath-taking memoir, knowing the inevitable drew near with every turn of the page. Whether a sign of a life well-lived or of the cruelty of death, it seems the authors were not ready to say goodbye either.
In the end, I found little solace or closure in these memoirs on death; in fact, they underscored for me the profound unfairness of a beautiful life cut short. But their searing honesty and courage and insight kept my grief company. And yet if you read the book from beginning to end, you get only a few glimpses of him. A lot of the essays in the memoir are about others.
But for Trevor, the person he is writing about is much more important that the person who is writing. Both writers are best known for their short stories.
Each chapter — especially the earlier ones about his boarding school and university days in Ireland — is presented as though it were a self-contained short story in one of his collections. There seems to be little difference between the way Trevor writes about fictional and factual characters. I think he accepted that he would never know any characters — real or fictional — enough and so he felt freer. His characters are often more complex than they are seen as being by secondary characters in their own narratives — and that is exactly the same for real people with complex internal lives.
You know how he looks at the world, how he functions in it. Most, if not all the chapters, were originally written as essays for the Daily Telegraph , the New Yorker , and elsewhere. If you know his short stories and essays well you do see echoes between them. A memoir James Alan McPherson seems to take a similarly irreverent approach to life-writing. He grew up in the segregated South, in Savannah, Georgia, and I remember him telling me how, when he came to the North to work as a train porter, he sat on the bus and a white woman came on and sat down next to him.
He faced extreme poverty, too. He wrote two collections of short stories, Hue and Cry and Elbow Room , and then won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction — it was the first time the prize went to an African-American writer. So, historically he has been an important voice in this country. I think he struggled with things because he refused to simplify his situation and his thinking. He kept to himself but he was not a recluse — he was never a recluse. He was always in the community. He had all these generations of students who really respected him. It is a deeply felt book about being a writer.
I think the book was written with all of these limitations in mind — in his career, his life, his personal situation, and the racial tensions he experienced.
The book has more in common with C. But they could almost be in conversation with each other. And McPherson undertakes a similar pilgrimage through books.
What is he looking for? That human touch was what he had spent the whole of the first part of the book running away from. A central episode in the book is how he offered a house to an old African-American couple. When he did that there was still no human touch involved; the human touch came much later, when the old lady died.
I keep thinking back to this thing he used to say: I think when he was a young man he had all these dreams and those dreams were dashed by reality. And that idea just did not work out.
When I think of him I think mostly of the pain that he lived through. He called Crabcakes a memoir — what makes you add the prefix anti-? McPherson was so angry and he wanted to report this racial attack to these two white policemen who tried so hard to dismiss him. In the end, McPherson and the white man and the two policemen where sitting in the police car, and McPherson kept saying that he wanted to press changes; but the man was drunk and he started crying.
It was such a messy situation. In this memoir, the I who tells the story is far more elusive than the protagonists in his short fiction. At one point in this book, when McPherson is writing about himself, he goes into a third-person narration. He was a philosopher-writer. Much of his later work was concerned with philosophy and culture and time, and concepts like those.
And you start to see this interest in the second part of Crabcakes. At the start of the interview we discussed why a writer might choose to write autobiographically — which leaves a connected question hanging. Why might readers seek out autobiographical writing?
Or, as you put it in your book: I think readers — and I count myself among them — do feel drawn to autobiographical writing. Autobiographical books can be another way of getting to feel close to another person. We always have to have a few stars in our map, otherwise we will get lost. These books are proof that someone has already experienced what we are experiencing. It seems to be an almost universal desire to uncover a dirty pile of secrets. They offer so much more than a good tale studded with sparkly bits of gossip.
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Five Books participates in the Amazon Associate program and earns money from qualifying purchases. I was looking for more of a step-by-step way to get rid of clutter and organize.
Mar 02, Molly rated it liked it Shelves: This book is targeted at trying to help you get rid of stuff. She goes through a variety of reasons you might be keeping something. After describing the reasons, and providing some thought processes for how to let go of stuff, she has you list everything that you are keeping for that reason, and put sticker dots on things to give away or get rid of. She has you envision the rooms you want as motivation for getting rid of stuff. I think the strategies she suggests are very useful.
I personally do not find it useful to write down all my items -- this seems more exhausting than just pulling everything out and sorting through it. The categories also didn't resonate with me -- in other words, she grouped things in a way that isn't intuitive for me, making it likely I'd overlook lots of items in each category. In that way, the KonMarie method of taking "like items" all out and putting them on the floor seems like a much more fool-proof way to make sure you don't have hidden items all over your house that you really should get rid of.
In addition, once I decide to purge, I don't want to take the step of attaching stickers to objects, I just want to act. And, for those really struggling with getting rid of items, this method is a bit softer, with fewer cheesy statements compared to Marie Kondo and more specific strategies.
Sep 09, Carolyn Vandine west rated it liked it Shelves: Great ideas to purge all the stuff that we drown in and kills our joy in our homes. Great ideas of how to find homes and renovate the things you are keeping. A place for everything really enjoyed the step by step process. Took me forever to read this because I'm in denial about needing it.
Really I'm a very slow reader of nonfiction. Aug 07, Jes rated it liked it. I think this book's method of writing down why you are keeping every single item you own would be tedious. I think the method of holding each item in your hand and asking yourself if it "sparks joy" would be more efficient. Though, perhaps for those less in tune with their feelings, the written method would be best for them. I also think this book advocates for decorating in a way that would enable a person to hang on to more things than they really need.
But I'm sure it would just be a part of I think this book's method of writing down why you are keeping every single item you own would be tedious. But I'm sure it would just be a part of making their home feel like home to them, so I understand the meaning behind it. Dramatic change has always been my go-to response.
Jul 27, Rebecca Reid rated it really liked it Shelves: It inspired me to walk around the house with a box for Goodwill! I am, in general, a person who likes to keep things clean. This book reminded me how I can still declutter! In her book, Ms Culbertson helped me identify my weak areas for accumulating clutter, recognize what I really want out of my space, and undertake some easy solutions for eliminating clutter without g It inspired me to walk around the house with a box for Goodwill!
In her book, Ms Culbertson helped me identify my weak areas for accumulating clutter, recognize what I really want out of my space, and undertake some easy solutions for eliminating clutter without guilt. As I read her short book about clutter, I felt inspired to walk around my home with a garbage bag and box for donations. More at my blog Sep 17, Jen rated it it was amazing.
This is one of the best decluttering books I've read and I've read a lot of them! I love the part about how items have a natural life cycle, a reasonable amount of time in which they are considered useful. After that time is up, we can let it go without feeling guilty. We don't have to hold onto everything just because it still works. The question is about whether it is useful to us NOW. I'm not big on the journaling parts but I can see how that would be helpful for some.
She really tackles th This is one of the best decluttering books I've read and I've read a lot of them! She really tackles the sentimental items issue that so many stuggle with.