memoir

Podcast • November 8, 2011

My evening with Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s a writers’ writer gone suddenly, in her seventies, rock star and phenomenon, meeting a hungry market for introspections on death both sudden, as in the case of her husband John Gregory Dunne and Didion’s 2005 best-seller, The Year of Magical Thinking; or slow and almost unfathomable death, which came to Didion’s adopted daughter Quintana Roo, at 39, and prompted Blue Nights.

Joan Didion is reading from her second smashing meditation on death, Blue Nights. And I’m her interlocutor and foil again onstage in Cambridge. With a woman of the considered written word, not the spontaneous spoken word, it’s a tricky job. And it didn’t solve for me the puzzle of Didion’s power. But how could I not share it, or you not respond?

Joan Didion’s a writers’ writer gone suddenly, in her seventies, rock star and phenomenon, meeting a hungry market for introspections on death both sudden, as in the case of her husband John Gregory Dunne and Didion’s 2005 best-seller, The Year of Magical Thinking; or slow and almost unfathomable death, which came to Didion’s adopted daughter Quintana Roo, at 39, and prompted Blue Nights. Six hundred readers bought books and tickets to hear Didion and pack the First Church in Harvard Square last night.

One beauty of Blue Nights, I am saying toward the close, is that when Joan Didion writes “frail” about herself, what we remember is the oppposite: “indomitable.” But I’ve got to get down the odd gaps in this book. They’re disquieting, then illuminating. This is her Quintana book, for the adopted daughter who died, but there are scant traces of Quintana in it. The mother and writer has preempted all the suffering and mourning in this sad story. Quintana’s wedding day is central but the man Quintana married is just barely named. About Quintana, we learn that she had abandonment issues — as an adopted only child under the roof of two driven writers; that she graduated from Barnard, became a photo editor at Elle, that she drank too much and got desperately sick twice in her thirties, and died… But we do not meet Quintana past her teens. We learn, as Didion writes, that “Quintana is one of the areas about which I have difficulty being direct.” Blue Nights is Joan alone — Joan’s loss, Joan’s frailty, Joan’s inadequate mothering: it may be tracing the arc of Joan’s writing career more than Quintana’s life, as Nathan Heller writes in a penetrating comment in the New York Times Magazine.

So the book about Quintana is really about Joan, and for me the evening with Joan is about the audience, including me. Were we there as inadequate parents, as mortals in fear of death? Were we there generously as a Didion support group that came to feed more than be fed. Or not so happily, as groupies around a brand, famous as Didion is for dropping the brandnames of cake-makers and grand hotels? Would we have been there last night, would I have posted these words, if her name weren’t Joan Didion?

Thanks to the Harvard Book Store for hosting the reading and recording the conversation.

Podcast • March 3, 2011

Andre Dubus III: How “The Fighter” Became The Writer

Andre Dubus III has written a Dickensian memoir in a Mark Wahlberg sort of setting. Townie is the tale of a bullied little boy (eldest son of a Louisiana family in a broken-down Massachusetts mill ...


Andre Dubus III has written a Dickensian memoir in a Mark Wahlberg sort of setting. Townie is the tale of a bullied little boy (eldest son of a Louisiana family in a broken-down Massachusetts mill town) becoming, first, a one-punch knockout street fighter, and later a National Book Award finalist for The House of Sand and Fog. Strangely, beautifully, painfully along the way, he finds himself coming into the same demanding vocation — writing — that had drawn his famous father away from a severely neglected family.

The story unfolds in the 1970s along the Merrimack River, just downstream from the scene of Wahlberg’s almost-Oscar movie, “The Fighter.” We’re in the same rough bars with the same wacko clans, hearing the same bad Boston accents — his friend Cleary says he’s always “hawny in the mawning.” As in Dickens, we are confronting social squalor in the home of the great imperial nation and wondering where the glory went — or where it is hiding in the town, even now.

There’s a lot of wondrously authentic energy in Andre Dubus’s voice, on the page and in our conversation. I remarked to him: Townie reads like David Copperfield, with heaps of crystal meth, junk TV, Fritos and Vietnam thrown in. He’s speaking here about his own memory of metamorphosis, as the crysalis of the thug breaks and the artist starts to spread his wings:

It’s something that was semi-conscious, this thought of the membrane in my life, and then became more clarified as I began to describe it in this book. … One thing that I realized, I would see people that weren’t experienced fighters, and they would do this shoving match thing: “Oh yeah? Oh yeah?” Experienced fighters don’t do any foreplay; once they know it’s a fight situation they pound you in the face as hard as they can. … Once you learn how do it, that psychological hymen in you is always broken. You can always do it. Once you break through it you’ll know how to do it and you’ll keep doing it. And that’s the barrier; once you learn to cross that you can fight.

But to the writing: I had a very interesting, strange experience when I first began to write. It felt so familiar, and I couldn’t quite place what it was. But it was another kind of membrane, where I was allowing myself to seep into the being, into the private skin of another, an imaginary other. I had to somehow disappear to become them, in the same way as a fighter. I had to let my fear of my safety disappear and my sense of myself disappear.

Andre Dubus III in conversation with Chris Lydon in Boston, March 1, 2011.

Podcast • January 11, 2011

Knowing Jesse: Among the Books of 2010, a Life Lesson

I am always, I am sometimes tough I am sometimes heroic I am sometimes tough I am always, I am always brave I am always tough I am sometimes invisible I am always brave, heroic ...

CTP42

I am always, I am sometimes tough
I am sometimes heroic
I am sometimes tough
I am always, I am always brave
I am always tough
I am sometimes invisible
I am always brave, heroic
I am always, I am sometimes brave
I am sometimes, I am always tough.

Jesse Cooper

Marianne Leone Cooper wrote the book that stuck to my ribs at the end of 2010: Knowing Jesse.

Way off our usual path of wonkery and literary modernism, this is a book (and a writer) that ambush the heart, that confront our numbness with numbers and the new. It’s a book that feeds our neglected hunger for a humanistic revival, for a transformation of consciousness. It is Marianne Leone Cooper’s fiery, often very funny account of her son’s brief, brilliant life. Jesse Cooper, as she writes, was “an honor-roll student who loved to windsurf and write poetry. He also had severe cerebral palsy and was quadriplegic, unable to speak, and wracked by seizures. He died suddenly at age seventeen.”

Marianne Leone played Joanne Moltisanti on The Sopranos for four seasons on HBO. Chris Cooper, her husband, is a supporting-part superstar in Hollywood. Knowing Jesse is a celebrity-proof story of love-struck strivers from acting school bringing up their baby in Hoboken in the 80s, about their readiness, as it turned out, to be led by their hearty, heroic, sometimes brave, sometimes invisible boy Jesse. By the 6th grade, after storming their way into mainstream public-school classes in Kingston, Massachusetts, Jesse was writing compelling poems, as above — each with its own rhythm, design and heart:

I love that poem. What I remember when Jesse was writing that poem is how insistent he was on the way it looked on the page, which I thought was really interesting. “I am sometimes invisible” grabs you by the throat in that poem. I actually thought of calling this book “sometimes invisible,” because people with disabilities are sometimes invisible in our society… When you’re in middle school you have these heroic self-images, but he also knew that he was sometimes invisible.

We never downplayed the disability. I used to talk to Jesse and say you know, Jesse, you’d be a master of the universe if it weren’t for this disability. You would be a little white boy with a movie-star daddy, and more money than 99 percent of the world deals with every single day. But we are a minority. And because of that he was well schooled in Martin Luther King and Ghandi and all of those movements. I wanted him to be politically aware of what it meant to be a minority… In sixth grade, when it was black history month, the teacher says: I want each of you to pick a black personage to be. Everyone in the class picks a sports figure, except for Jesse who picks one of the kids who integrated Little Rock High School. And why is that? Because we read a book about it, together. About what that meant…

I did worry that I was grooming him to be more of an insurrectionist than maybe his own temperment would have made him. But I think he agreed. “I’m sometimes invisible” tells me that he got it. And his picking not a sports figure, but the kid who integrated Little Rock High School, told me that too. I wanted to give him a vision. He could take his intellect, have a life of the mind, and thrive with that.

Marianne Leone Cooper in conversation with Chris Lydon in Kingston, MA, January 6, 2011

Podcast • March 2, 2010

Tom Gleason’s Liberal Education: Memoir with Music

Tom Gleason might be everybody’s dream of an intellectual mentor: there are touches of Mr. Chips about Tom, and of his friend George Kennan, and of my big brother Peter, and your big brother, too, if you're blessed to have one. It’s my thought anyway that if you assemble a dozen or so people of Tom Gleason’s range and reading and curiosity and conversational talent, you’ve got yourself a university.

Call this a musical-conversational extension on the memoir of a beloved teacher, the historian of Russia at Brown University, Abbott Gleason, known as Tom. We’re connecting dots from Tolstoy to Orwell to Louis Armstrong in a big roomful of friends at Brown’s Watson Institute.

Tom Gleason might be everybody’s dream of an intellectual mentor: there are touches of Mr. Chips about Tom, and of his friend George Kennan, and of my big brother Peter, and your big brother, too, if you’re blessed to have one. It’s my thought anyway that if you assemble a dozen or so people of Tom Gleason’s range and reading and curiosity and conversational talent, you’ve got yourself a university.

A Liberal Education is the title of his memoir. It’s the private side of a career in Russian studies coinciding with four decades of Cold War. It warms and deepens my pleasure in the book to have known Tom well from odd angles: our daughters were college roommates; we’ve listened to jazz bands many Monday nights at Bovi’s Tavern in East Providence; we read War and Peace together in a small group two summers ago, then Moby Dick last summer. The Brothers Karamazov is next, in summer of 2010…

The fun of the book is in the disgressions — to the Tolstoyan family farm in Connecticut where young Tom spent his summers, where “workhorses… and a team of massive white oxen lingered, long after tractors and hayloaders were the rule on the more serious farms in the neighborhood… The haying was all done manually, with pitchforks, and many a wobbly load slid or topped off the wagon before it could be brought home to the barn. Farm work was usually over in time for drinks at the Big House before the sun had sunk much below the yardarm…”

The fun of our conversation is in our version of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, as Tom Gleason free-associates on the music of Bela Bartok, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane and Tom’s Harvard roommate John Harbison.

Maybe the meat of things is a reflection on the academic wars that came with Tom Gleason’s job:

CL: You we born into the Cold War, in a certain sense. You kept your powder dry in it. But in the book, as in life, you observed all the high and low politics of it, the ideological and academic politics of the Cold War period. So in the end, Tom, what the hell was it all about? Over here and over there, who got it right? Who, in retrospect, had wisdom on that huge subject?

TG:  Well, I’m not sure that getting it right and being wise are exactly the same thing. As far as getting it right goes, I tend to think — and I was a sort of left center person on the Cold War — the people on the two extremes, further to my right and further to my left, got it more interestingly at least, if not absolutely more right. By that I mean people like my colleague the British historian Michael Cox, who teaches at the University of Wales, and his Trotskyite friends always had a view that the Soviet Union was conceived in sin and betrayal, and it didn’t really belong in the world and it would someday pass away — and of course from their point of view, be replaced by something that was truly revolutionary, as Trotsky had believed.  And on the other side, my more conservative colleagues Adam Ulam, Robert Conquest, Richard Pipes, also from a quite different point of view believed that the Soviet Union did not belong in the modern world.  They believed that any nation or any empire which denied the market and denied the economic realities of the world, would not ultimately survive.  So in a certain sense the two extremes met, behind my back, so to speak, and in many ways they were the people who were sort of least surprised – Martin Malia being another one of the conservative ones.  But I think the two extremes were not necessarily the wisest people.  I think the wisest people in dealing with the cold war were those who tried to question their own motives and tried to question themselves and tried to take it one step at a time… I think the cold war got us into places where rhetorical flights could take us out of ourselves and get us well beyond where we wanted to be.  Once in a while I would catch myself saying something and my little super-ego would sort of pick itself up and rub its eyes and say “I’ve been asleep all this time, did I hear what you just said?”

Abbott (Tom) Gleason in conversation with Chris Lydon at the Watson Institute, March 1, 2010.

It’s a nice Gleasonesque thought that the folks who saw the Cold War prophetically were his adversaries at far opposite ends of the argument, and the very last people you’d have asked to do something about it.

Podcast • November 19, 2009

Mary Karr on Girls and their Dragons

Mary Karr, the poet and ever the “scrappy little beast,” gives me three more reasons to marvel, and cherish her, in her third memoir. Lit, after The Liars’ Club and Cherry, is the story of ...

Mary Karr, the poet and ever the “scrappy little beast,” gives me three more reasons to marvel, and cherish her, in her third memoir. Lit, after The Liars’ Club and Cherry, is the story of drinking her way to Catholicism, sobriety and more writing. Her title refers, she says, to the things that lit her early mid-life: spiritual practice, Jack Daniels and Literature.

Click to listen to Chris’s conversation with Mary Karr (27 minutes, 12 mb mp3).

I love, first, the company she keeps. Her writing group, her list of literary familiars, encompasses the best: Augustine, Cavafy, Faulkner, Brooks Haxton, Homer, Thomas Lux, Milosz, Milton, Nabokov, Shelley, David Foster Wallace, Tobias Wolff, Franz Wright. And she talks convincingly, with rapture, about the “community of the word” that has sustained her.

It’s the cathedral. I was totally without any kind of faith–I didn’t have a mystical bone in my body growing up. I thought God was like the Easter Bunny, I was probably in the fourth grade before I realized that people were really serious that they believed all this stuff. But I believed in the church of poetry. I believed that it was Eucharistic. You take someone’s words into your body–it is like you take their passion, their suffering into yourself–and you’re changed by it. You know, Shelley would say that the feeling humanizes you more, but you become in Cavafy’s phrase a “citizen of the city of ideas.” I was a very lonely, strange little girl in a kind of backwater town. You know, I had a crush on J. Alfred Prufrock, I mean I was a pitiful little thing. Of all the people. The other girls were ogling the lifeguard at the pool and I was saying “indeed” to try to sound British. So I was a little misfit, and getting to read these writers, these poets mostly, it was majestic. It was magnificent… You can have the entire artistic experience in one sitting, in one mouthful, in one moment.

I love, second, her catnip connection with kids younger than my kids, adventurous girls especially.

Girls will be foolish about boys. They’ll write a guy’s name on their notebooks over and over. And they’ll also go on great adventures and slaughter monsters from island to island and, like Odysseus, they’ll come home by leaving home. They will come into themselves. They will come to.

I love, third, her hard-won wisdom about memoirs, that first the writer has to get over one’s self and make room for something else:

I think if you’re working on a memoir and your main antagonist is not some aspect of yourself then you’re probably in the wrong business. You probably ought to be writing fiction or something else.  If you’re writing because someone did something to you, you are fighting the wrong dragon. A really great memoir has some aspect of self as the antagonist. In Tobais Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, his step-father did beat the crap out of him but it is an interesting book because Toby is trying on different costumes…throughout the book he puts on one male costume after another. It is about trying to be a man.

Mary Karr with Chris Lydon in Boston, 11.05.09.

November 16, 2005

A Conversation with Joan Didion

Joan Didion’s prose style, Norman Mailer has said, may be the finest since Hemingway. She trained her eye and her lean phrasing on the American counterculture of the 60's and 70's, on cold war foreign policy, on her native California and now on the hellish year after the death of her husband at the end of 2003.

 

joan didion Joan Didion’s prose style, Norman Mailer has said, may be the finest since Hemingway. She trained her eye and her lean phrasing on the American counterculture of the 60’s and 70’s, on cold war foreign policy, on her native California and now on the hellish year after the death of her husband at the end of 2003. They were a power couple in Hollywood and New York, who used to finish each other’s sentences, on paper. The night John Gregory Dunne had his fatal heart attack, she had just poured him a second scotch and was fixing their dinner. One week earlier their daughter Quintana Roo Dunne went unconscious from complications of a winter flu. Joan Didion’s new book, The Year of Magical Thinking, she says, was an attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose “any fixed idea I had about death, about illness…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.???

I spoke with Joan Didion last month at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, MA and we’ve made the conversation into an hour-long radio program complete with new readings from her book. I’m on assignment for the rest of the week in Tunisia at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).

Update, 17 Nov 2005, 2:30pm

Joan Didion won the National Book Award last night — a happy coincidence of timing, since this show probably aired right around the time her name was announced. So this morning we emailed a number of literary bloggers to get their take. Here’s a note that Scott Esposito (who writes Conversational Reading) just sent us:

I’m glad Joan Didion received the National Book Award

for a work of nonfiction, since I’ve most enjoyed her as an essayist. As a Californian, I appreciate Didion for capturing a sense of the intersections between our landscape and culture, as well as accurately portraying something of the strange sense of destiny that seems to be part of my home state. In my opinion, a couple of Didion’s best works have stood the test of time: her description of California’s relationship with water and aquaducts in the brilliantly titled White Album and her exploration of a gothic San Bernardino murder in Slouching Towards Bethlehem capture some part of the truth about California and still ring true today.

Scott Esposito, Conversational Reading
Update, 17 Nov 2005, 11:40pm

And Edward Champion (who writes Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant) contributed this:

I have greatly admired Didion as a writer since I first read the journalism that cemented her standing. But, however great Didion’s book, I wonder if a writer of Didion’s clear credentials needs more laurels.

I’m more excited about William T. Vollmann’s win. While Vollmann has started to achieve recognition from a unique makeup of academics and cult audiences who appreciate what Tom LeClair has styled “prodigious fiction,” Vollmann’s work has often been dismissed by more mainstream literary audiences (read: book reviewers who resent being handed “difficult” books) — simply because Vollmann dares to write about a certain cross-section of society that remains largely invisible to fiction and certainly isn’t palatable to mainstream tastes.

Vollmann’s win strikes the same pleasant chord as last year’s odd controversy concerning the five unknown women from New York — in the way that the National Book Foundation has embraced an unexpected choice. And yet this morning’s headlines read “Didion Wins National Book Award,” with the stories often confining Vollmann to a mere footnote.

Edward Champion, Edward Champion’s Return of the Reluctant
Update, 21 Nov 2005, 8:00am

Robert Birnbaum (renowned for his author interviews on Identity Theory) sent us this:

I am as near a Joan Didion fanboy as I can get (about anyone)— having read most of her books and had the singular pleasure of a chat with her around the time of the publication of her last novel The Last Thing He Wanted. But for some (I do shy away from stories fact or fiction, about parents losing their children) reasons I have had zero interest in reading her latest offering. I suppose if Ms. Joan were to offer her grocery list for publication, it would be more attractive to me.

Having said that, while it is no surprise to me that The Year of Magical Thinking won a National Book Award (actually, nothing about book awards is surprising), I am puzzled about what about this cultural moment has made this book a best seller. I am not aware that Didion’s acute political –cultural observations in the New York Review of Books (perhaps it’s the venue) have attracted the enthusiastic, near hysterical audience as for her more personal work, Where I was From and the newest book. Is it the fascination with the ineffability of death, grief and suffering that is the focus of Didion’s memoir? Or the harrowing experience of losing both one’s life partner and child? Or would it be a hunger for tramping around the private and personal matters of others? Does the numbing effect of a society working overtime, or in the current argot, 24/7, turning us into efficient consuming units make Didion’s hyper sorrowful meditation the ultimate cathartic antidote?

I suppose I should be able to answer these questions but at the moment I can not. Perhaps I’ll have to get around to reading Joan Didion’s book. But not now.

Robert Birnbaum, Identity Theory