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I spent most of this weekend reading a hefty book for review, then running to catch up on corporate work and student papers. Then, for about a half hour, I calmed down and read The New York Times. I found the interview everyone else has likely read by now—the one in which A.L. Kennedy talks to John Williams about The Blue Book, and other such matters.

I found this particular exchange quite nicely juicy. I juxtapose it with a photo I took of my own classroom chalkboard, when I was prepping for the conversation my students and I were about to have about Caroline Knapp's memoir, Drinking: A Love Story. 

You can teach reading. You can teach critique. But you should not, as Kennedy points out here, tell someone, especially an author, what to think.


Have you ever learned anything specific about your craft from reading a critic’s reaction to your work?

From a professional critic, no. I’ve never expected to. In the U.K., the critical culture can be fairly moribund and dominated by an oddly ill-informed set of academic assumptions. There’s less and less space or money for serious criticism. From critics — which is to say, people who look closely at my work and are true and wide-ranging readers — yes, I have. But paying too much attention to external opinion — fashions, theories, trends, friends — puts you a couple of years behind your own timeline, because critics only ever follow. That whole scene can take you away from your center and your voice, while making you self-conscious. It’s a toxic combination. And an adult writer can’t always be expecting this little fantasy undergraduate workshop to tell them what to think. If you’re the author, it’s your decision to find out what you think and what you want to say and then get on with it. If it were a group effort, your name wouldn’t be the only one on the title.

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Yesterday in class, after teaching ourselves the memoir Drinking: A Love Story (Caroline Knapp), we allowed music to take us on a journey. Three different pieces—a touch of Cuba, a touch of tango, a touch of reggae. I wanted the students to find within the rhythms some memory of movement—of their own bodies taken across place and time. What is it to walk, to run, to drive, to jolt, to slide forward? How do we find the language that moves a passage ahead while at the same time unblurring the particulars of place, weather, mood? It was, in part, a lesson in verbs, or it might have been.

Later, coming home, I tried to remember my own journey language. How might I have attacked the assignment I gave to my own students? I recalled this passage from my third memoir Still Love in Strange Places. It is an odd thing to read your own work, years on. But this day at St. Anthony's farm, my husband's home, is still alive in me.

Wanting time to myself before I surrendered to the Spanish, I slid out of the tree and set off across the courtyard and out through the crooked, metal gate, calling to no one in particular that I wasn't going far. I went down the dirt road between the two dug-out walls of earth that towered above my head. Hiking up the road while I was hiking down came two brightly dressed women, their hair the color of ink, their postures accommodating the pitch of the road as well as the woven baskets in their arms and the plastic water jugs that sat on the yaguales upon their heads. One jug was blue and one was orange, and the women kept their eyes low as they passed, not meeting mine, not inviting inquiry, not keen, I sensed, on my camera.

I hadn't gone far before the dogs found me, an ugly, snarly pack, half starved and probably only partly sane, three or four, maybe, I can't remember. Mongrels. Their coats short, sparse, bristly as a wild pig's hide, their ears angered flat against their heads. They had nothing between them but their hunger, no reason not to attack the thin, white American girl-woman who had come among them accidentally and who now stood, grossly transfixed, as they blasphemed her through yellow teeth. I was aware of a broken tree limb on the road. I picked it up. I heeled my way up the incline, holding the stick out before me like some kind of Man of La Mancha warrior. I inched backward. Jowl to jowl, the dogs howled forward. I wondered if Bill would hear, if I'd be rescued, if I should turn and run like hell.

But before I could act, I was saved by a barefooted boy who out of nowhere appeared with a fistful of dog-deterring rocks. He hurled. The dogs scattered. The dogs returned. He hurled again. In the dissipating dust, I gestured my thanks, then half walked, half ran to the place I'd come from. I held the camera tight against my chest. I cursed the country, and I blessed it. I hurried past the gate of St. Anthony's, past a herd of wild chickens, past more women bearing jugs. I kept on walking until I came upon a path cut into the high wall of earth beside the road. The path rose vertically on tight, hard, dirt steps, and it was at the end of this path, as I'd been told, that the peasant dead were laid to rest. I swung my camera onto my back and pulled myself toward them with my hands.

To be among the dead at St. Anthony's is to enter into communion with wild turkeys....

For more thoughts on memoirs, memoir making, and prompt exercises, please visit my dedicated Handling the Truth page.

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Let's Take the Long Way Home, Gail Caldwell's classic and classically beautiful memoir of friendship, hit me deeply when I first read it.  It is a dignified book, a true story of loss.  Caldwell had written of her friend, the writer Caroline Knapp, who had fought off anorexia and alcoholism by the time the two met, and who had shared, with Caldwell, a love of rivers and of dogs.  Caldwell had written of Knapp's dying, from lung cancer, just as Knapp's life was finally making sense.  Personal happiness and calm had been found.  A door had opened.  Cancer slammed it shut.

Caldwell's memoir left me with a lingering desire to know more about Caroline Knapp, and yesterday I finally read Drinking: A Love Story, the famously famous memoir about Knapp's slide into and recovery from alcoholism. I'm not sure why I had avoided this book for so long.  I'm not sure what I thought it would be.  But what I discovered, in Drinking, was an immeasurably intelligent and quiet voice.  I found a woman I am sure I would have liked.

There isn't the bravado, in Drinking, of the Big Survivor.  There isn't the boast one sometimes hears in the recounting of harrowing tales—Can you believe I was like that?  Can you imagine I survived?  I know it's nasty, I know I was a jerk, but secretly, really, wasn't it all kind of wondrous, in a twisted (I'll admit it) way?  There isn't the sense that Knapp believes her story trumps all other tales. There is only the sense that perhaps by telling her tale—by exploring the slide, the massive deceptions, the dangers, the heat and seeming loveliness of alcohol, the balm of community—she may be helpful to others.  This is not memoir as exorcism or exhibitionism, in other words.  It's not a memoir in which the rememberer pretends to remember any more than she does.  It's a book that is moving and hopeful and sad.  It's impact, on me, will forever linger.

I returned to Caldwell's memoir after finishing Drinking.  I read again those opening pages.  I understood—it was even clearer now—the size of Caldwell's loss.

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