The True Life Novel + Cosmos Glory

Day 194 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project, and way back at the beginning of the year a couple I know was reading Half Broke Horses, by Jeanette Walls. It was for some reason on my mind yesterday, when I wrote about particular sadnesses instead, and this morning, when I stopped by Goodreads, there it was, in an ad by Target, like a little omen/reminder, so here it is now.

I'm interested in its subtitle identification as "a true life novel."

Walls's first book was a memoir, The Glass Castle, about her own upbringing, that was a "common book" at some colleges, including my son's, so it is in our house, he has read it, and I plan to read it someday. I do like memoirs and need to read Zippy, by Haven Kimmel, mentioned a couple days ago. Maybe I did read it. Maybe that's a problem with memoirs....or my squished brain cells. Hmm, if I am going to write my own memoirs, 1) I better do it fast, before any more brain cells get squished and 2) I better get vaguely famous fast, so anyone might be interested. Oh, wait. The Glass Castle is what made Walls famous! One more squish.

Anyhoo, in Half Broke Horses, she becomes her grandmother, to narrate that memoir, but thus, since she's not her, it's a novel. Or it's fiction, anyway. The Washington Post review (posted at Amazon) compares it to Charles Dickens in its sprawl of incident but also points out the limitations of true life as novel structure; it can't go where it needs to go if it didn't go there in true life.

This comes back to one of my gentle peeves, the autobiographical novel, the one that some say everyone writes. Some write one great one--To Kill a Mockingbird--in a lifetime. Some put that first autobiographical novel in a drawer and move on to true fiction, that might, of course, be based on witnessed/experienced/rearranged true life. Some do research, combine it with acute observation and wild imagination, and come up with true fiction. Some do a conscious blend, at some point, as in Alice Munro stories, and The View from Castle Rock, in her historical particular. And some do a con job, presenting fiction as memoir, to make it sell. With variations, blends, and blurrings in between.

And so I am back to the fantabulous flowers in Lorel's garden as my image for today. In my own true life back yard, the blue morning glories I planted from seed are finally blooming. In Lorel's back yard, well, what you see is what you see.

Melancholy Baby

Day 43 of the "What are you reading, and why?" project.

Today, and since last night, I am feeling a little melancholy. The spring itself is joyous--the sunshine, temps in the 60s, birds and animals out, dogs barking at the new smells, etc.--but perhaps the shift to the new season, or the energy it takes to shift, creates this other, poignant mood.

So I'll tell you that Beth is reading "Ode on Melancholy" by John Keats, and two other poems with a strain of melancholy in them, for a poetry discussion tonight. Her discussion group is also reading T. S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and that's melancholy with its yellow fog and whispering women, doubts and regrets, mermaids singing. So is Walt Whitman's "Facing West from California's Shores," even with its "very pleased and joyous moment," as it's about traveling the world and not finding, or quite remembering, what one set out to discover.

And melancholy is one of those mixed emotions, isn't it? The sadness is dominant, but the sweetness is underlying. I think of Abraham Lincoln's melancholy. 2009 was a big Lincoln year, especially here in Illinois, and I am still halfway through Team of Rivals, which I want to finish 1) before the movie comes out and 2) before I start The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage, by the poet Daniel Mark Epstein, whose book Lincoln and Whitman: Parallel Lives in Civil War Washington I very much enjoyed. I'm also a loyal reader of Epstein's poetry because he's a Kenyon College alum, like me!

Some years ago, I had my Lincoln College students read an excerpt from Lincoln's Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled his Greatness by Joshua Wolf Shenk. I heard Doris Kearns Goodwin speak, and she does like that more open term, melancholy, to describe Lincoln's famous sadness. She prefers it to the clinical-sounding "depression." The discussion of the medications of the time in the Shenk book and Atlantic excerpt fascinated my college students, as several of them were also medicated on our more modern drugs; in Lincoln's day getting treated for ailments might add lead poisoning to the list of troubles!

Biographies and memoirs are particularly good at exploring strains of sadness in our lives. Paulette is now reading Hermione Lee's thick biography of Edith Wharton. I have been reading it, too, slowly, and my bookmark in it is in roughly the same spot as my bookmark in A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, by Blake Bailey--that is, about a quarter of the way through each. I can report that one summer, reading a number of things at the same time, I made it all the way through Cynthia Griffin Wolff's thick biography of Emily Dickinson. I think what happens is that I encounter a rough spot in someone else's life...and just can't get past it...but I must, as I am reading to learn how to be human.

And Michael and Kay, who sometimes read the same book at the same time, took up Half Broke Horses, a "true-life novel," by Jeanette Walls, after reading her memoir The Glass Castle.

Tonight I'll be attending a poetry reading by David Baker, who is poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. It's poetry, so I imagine I'll encounter a bit of melancholy there...but perhaps in the way that blues music relieves by giving voice to the blues...