My sincerest apologies go out to anyone who has checked this site in the last two plus months only to find the same post at the top of the blog. No new posts is no way to keep people interested in your site’s content, I know. But I’m finally clearing out the clutter that this semester has brought me–much of which I’ve created–and I’ll be getting this little book blog up and running on a (more) frequent basis. I’ll be posting the review of Dave Reidy’s collection, Captive Audience, tomorrow (or in six days). Thank you for stopping by.
Dave Reidy is the author of Captive Audience, a short story collection. He has an MFA from the University of Florida, and his work has been published in Pindeldyboz and The MacGuffin. His story, “The Regular,” was selected by Charles D’Ambrosio as the winner of the 2007 Emerging Writers Network Short Fiction Contest.
To read, “The Regular,” click here.
From the publisher: ”The lives of three strangers interconnect in unforeseen ways–and with unexpected consequences–in acclaimed author Dan Chaon’s gripping, brilliantly written new novel.”
Await Your Reply–Chaon’s second novel, fourth book–was released today, and already it’s receiving favorable reviews. Steve Almond writes in the L.A. Times, “Await Your Reply is a riveting thriller, chock-full of plot twists, and a sober meditation on the erosion of identity in the age of technology.”
The New York Times has posted an excerpt of AYP here, and just as he did with his first novel, You Remind Me of Me, Chaon opens the story with quite a hook. I’ve ordered my copy and can’t wait to read the whole thing.
Live Nude Books: You’ve written several personal narratives for a number of publications; have you always had a desire to write a memoir? What made you choose to write about this subject—the experience of purchasing a home?
Mary Elizabeth Williams: I’ve always written first person — I would go on field trips as a kid and come home and compose an essay about what I did and how I felt.
The challenge for any writer is to get out of your own navel and figure out how your own experience will resonate on a more universal level. That’s why I chose to do a book about home — it wasn’t something unique to me, it’s something anyone who’s ever had a roof over his or her head has context for. And what happened during the housing bubble was particularly dramatic — I wanted people to know wherever they were and whatever they went through, they weren’t alone.
LNB: In the book, you develop and explore several themes: familial bonds, friendship, security, and how place contributes to a person’s identity. When you began working on the memoir, did you have an idea for the types of themes you wanted to touch on? Did those themes emerge naturally through the writing process?
MEW: The book went through some changes — originally a lot more took place in my childhood. But as I refined the narrative, I was more involved in the story of a family in a particular place and time in history, so that began to take more of the center stage. As I got more confident as a first time author, I realized you don’t need to know my whole life to get why buying a home was so important. I also wanted to emphasize that this notion of the “ownership society” wasn’t just something that hit me because of my specific circumstances — it was something that was very aggressively peddled to the American people in general. That’s why I brought in the stories of my friends and family and their homebuying experiences.
LNB: During the three-year process of becoming a homeowner, you were raising two kids and working. How were you able to find time to write this book? Do you have a writing routine?
MEW: Well, sleep is the first to go. I got in the habit very early on of firing up the laptop right after putting the kids to bed, and making myself do at least a solid hour every night. I could carve out longer blocks on the weekends. No checking email. No surfing. Just me and a word document.
The key is to just bang away and keep banging. I cut a lot of parts and I rewrote even more, but if you’re in the routine of writing, you become very Pavlovian about it.
LNB: What are you currently working on?
MEW: I’m writing regularly for Salon.com and continuing to contribute to PRI’s morning show, and I have two messy, much too unformed book ideas. Summer has kicked my routine to bits, so the plan is to start developing the next book more fully in the fall. I’m basically going to put both ideas in the steel cage, write every night, and see which one emerges victorious.
LNB: What have you recently read that you’re recommending to friends and other readers?
MEW: Lily Burana’s, I Love a Man in Uniform, is great — it’s the story of an unlikely military wife that’s incredibly funny and moving and taught me so much about this world that’s so alien to me. And I’m just finishing Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim. You could call it a supernatural noir novel — imagine Sam Spade if he’d gone to hell and you start to get the idea. It’s fantastic.
Homeownership constitutes a good portion of the American Dream. It represents a transitional stage in people’s lives, moving from the temporary lifestyle of renting to the permanence of buying. It’s an investment—both financially and in terms of family security. Mary Elizabeth Williams includes all of these as reasons for why she wants to own a home in her debut memoir, Gimme Shelter. But what’s made just as clear during this three-year period is the desire for her and her family to find a place to call home that represents their personality.
Originally from New Jersey, Williams had visions of living in New York City. Before the dot-com boom of the mid-nineties relocated her to San Francisco, she lived across the river from NYC and described its distance from her as being “light years” away. When the dot-com bubble burst, she and her husband moved to Brooklyn to start a family. They knew that New York was where they wanted to establish themselves and figured the money they were pumping into rent would be better served going toward a more permanent investment. However, home values in the neighborhood where they lived and wanted to stay began rising steadily. They were being priced out of the area they had called home since 1999.
The decision to leave the area, or move completely out of the city, seems logical. If you can’t afford to live where you want, look elsewhere. But that’s not how Williams sees it. When pondering the idea of returning to New Jersey, she writes, “In my mind, if I move back to exactly where I clawed my way out of, I haven’t gone anywhere in my life at all.” She knows for sure that she must stay in the city, but where-to becomes a large obstacle. As Williams explains, “In New York, if you live off your friends’ nearest subway line, or anywhere that involves crossing a park, body of water, or from east to west, you will never ever see them.” People are a big part of what makes a location.
It’s easy to empathize with the frustrations she experiences—the lack of adequate homes for sale in the area, financial woes, a pregnancy, and the various hoops one has to jump through when trying to obtain a mortgage—all of which contribute to delaying her and her family from reaching their goal. The entire process envelops her, creating emotional strain and causing her to doubt whether or not to continue house hunting. Anytime a setback or thoughts about leaving New York occur, Williams weaves in a friend’s story that applies to the situation.
These anecdotes seem to help reaffirm her desire to live in New York and provide a certain level of comfort to her. Knowing that she’s experiencing stress and anxiety about this transition similar to what others have felt helps her maintain a level of sanity that might otherwise vanish. She also contrasts the friends’ situations—involving divorce, expanding families, 9/11, and even hurricane Katrina—to hers. In light of her friends’ circumstances, Williams realizes that her family’s situation is different. They are as much a part of New York as it is of them.
You can make the best of what’s inside four walls, but what characterizes your place in the world is what greets you when you step outside. It’s like the old guy I overheard in the deli once. “Leave?” he’d said. “I need my track. I need my bookies.” For Mike and Deb and their sons, it’s the lawn and this swing set and this hammock. For us it’s the throb of humanity, viewed from a stoop.
Williams does a wonderful job of pinpointing the locations of neighborhoods in the city, describing them in detail, and providing enough background information on them to give the reader a sense of their cultural and economic importance to the narrative. And more importantly, she gains the readers trust. Her responses to adversity feel genuine, likely because the insight she offers isn’t predictable. She candidly shares a wide range of emotion throughout the book, which made me root for her every step of the way.
Mary Elizabeth Williams is the author of Gimme Shelter, a memoir chronicling her journey toward becoming a homeowner. She has contributed to the following books, as well: Not Quite What I was Planning: Six Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure; The Imperfect Mom: Candid Confessions of Mothers Living in the Real World; The Complete Idiots Guide to Movies, Flicks & Films; and The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors.
Bio from the Gimme Shelter book jacket:
Mary Elizabeth Williams is the cultural critic for Public Radio International’s morning news show, THE TAKEWAWAY, and a regular contributor to Salon.com. She has written for many publications including THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORK OBSERVER, and PARENTS. She has appeared on Court TV and has lectured on journalism and community at New York University and Columbia University. She lives in New York City.
To read a sample of Williams’s work, click here.
To see the book trailer for Gimme Shelter, click here.
A few months back I watched Man on Wire, a documentary about Philippe Petit tightrope walking between the World Trade Center towers while they were still under construction. The film blew me away, and I began searching the internet for more information on the man and his story. While conducting my search, I came across a news release for an upcoming book that was said to be related: Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.
From the publisher’s website:
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.
Since its late June release, I’ve read some fantastic reviews of this book. The late great Frank McCourt (whose review can be read by clicking on the book title link above, and scrolling halfway down the page) said, “This is fiction that gets the heart thumping,” and, “this is a great New York book, not just for New Yorkers but for anyone who walks any sort of tightrope at all.”
And here’s a snippet of what Tom Junod, writer-at-large for Esquire, had to say about the book:
Let the Great World Spinis not Man on Wire; it is not the story of Philippe Petit, whom McCann inhabits but never names; not the story of another dancer suspended, by force of miracle, in thin air. Rather it is the story of the people on the ground and what it is like to be implicated in a freedom they can never attain.
To read Junod’s full review, click here.
For the last few weeks, I’ve searched for Paul Yoon’s contact information in order to ask him a few questions about his book. My searches came up empty. There are, however, several interviews with the writer available online. The following is an excerpt from one conducted by The Rumpus:
Rumpus: All of the stories in ONCE THE SHORE the Shore are set on the fictional South Korean island of Solla. In their original versions, some of these stories mentioned the real island of Cheju as their setting. Can you describe your decision to shift these stories into a fictional world?
Paul Yoon: When I started ONCE THE SHORE I definitely had Cheju Island, and other islands in that area, in mind. I hadn’t been to Cheju in about fourteen years and I couldn’t afford a trip back or take the time off from day jobs to travel there, so I relied on research and my imagination. When I finished, though, and saw the book as a whole, I realized that the stories didn’t really have anything to do with Cheju Island at all. I had changed virtually everything—geography, events, and history—to tell these stories. And it occurred to me that it was never my intention to write about that specific island…
For the complete interview, click here.
Before reading Paul Yoon’s debut collection, I couldn’t recall the last time chills ran down my spine upon reaching a short story’s end. Since finishing Once the Shore, a new lapse in memory has occurred: I can’t remember the exact number of times I felt those surges down my spine while reading this book. It was too many to count. The reason being: Yoon’s stories work the same way Richard Hugo suggests good poems should in his essay, “Writing Off the Subject.” Each story travels along a central road with several possible exits, and near their conclusions, Yoon makes poetic turns that at once take the reader by surprise, but ultimately seem unavoidable.
The characters in these stories all desire similar things: preservation of lost memories, people, and/or objects. In the title story, an American woman visits a small island off the coast of Korea where her husband had gone AWOL while serving in the US military. When her husband had returned home after his tour years ago, he was not the same man she married, which caused strain to their marriage until his passing. By visiting this island, she attempts to rekindle the memory of the man she knew and loved.
Meanwhile, a young waiter working at the resort where she’s staying receives news that his brother’s fishing boat has been destroyed in an accident involving a US submarine. He has no way to search for his brother, no way of knowing if there were survivors. So he decides to help this elderly woman find what she came to the island in search of. The story seems to be set up to have an either/or conclusion: she’ll either find what she’s looking for, or she won’t. But that’s not the direction Yoon takes. As in all of stories that make up this collection, he deviates from an expected outcome, often showing how longing for another shot at the past and the need for closure can set up improbable expectations.
In “Faces to the Fire,” a woman is reunited with her childhood friend, a bastard boy from the wrong side of the island. As a girl, she thought they were meant to be together, and his return sparks the sense of false hope that her childhood dreams were coming true. However, his homecoming is prompted by malicious intentions. Characters in several stories either see apparitions of lost loved ones, or they confuse new acquaintances with those to whom they are no longer connected. Cultural themes are also woven into the mix to create additional roadblocks for the characters.
The US military’s interest in the island forces the natives to adapt to the occupation. When a couple searches for the wreckage of their son’s boat after a rogue bomb destroyed it, they must pass a Navy checkpoint in the once vacant sea. One village allows a soldier who has gone AWOL into its community, and the US military begins disrupting these people’s lives. As the years advance and technology on the island grows, the need for jobs like the sea woman’s–who dives for minutes at a time to catch shellfish–and the woodcarver’s slowly decline. And when developers work to modernize the island and transform it into a tourist locale, families must decide whether they should sell their land, or stay in the only home they’ve ever known.
These stories may seem bleak; however, there are several moments of beauty. Especially in the prose, where the poetic similarities continue. Within a sentence, Yoon will delay the outcome of the present action, increasing both drama and tension. When he describes a tragic moment—like the surfacing submarine, colliding with a fishing boat—the language he uses is both lovely and sad:
But what keeled and snapped upon impact was a fishing boat. And within it a crew of fishermen. Their bodies, once broken, sunk into a dark depth, their limbs positioned, without effort, in the most graceful forms known to any dancer.
These stories are linked by place and specific events, though the characters from one story don’t appear by name in others. Often the back-story of characters from one story provides the premise for a later one. What amazes me is that the setting—this Korean island, which remains a constant throughout the book—is described so vividly, it makes me think he wrote these passages while lying on its sandy beaches. Not so, however. This island only exists in the mind of the writer, but his ability to convince me that its real is one of the many reasons I’ll be coming back to this book again and again.
If you’re interested in quality online reading, here’s a great site to check out: Narrative Magazine. It features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and audio files of authors reading their work. Currently, the following writers’ works are featured: Jhumpa Lahiri, Richard Bausch, Stuart Dybek, Aimee Nezhukumatahil, Robert Olen Butler, and Charles D’Ambrosio, among others. In order to access the site’s material, registration is required; however, it’s free to sign up.
From the Mission Statement:
NARRATIVE is the leading online publisher of first-rank fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. A nonprofit organization, NARRATIVE is dedicated to advancing the literary arts in the digital age by supporting the finest writing talent and encouraging readership around the world and across generations. Our online library of new literature by celebrated authors and by the best new and emerging writers is available for free.
