The Happy Booker was kind enough to invite me over from the Hinterlands to blather on a bit here in HB-Central while she’s off strapping packing tape around cardboard boxes and dreaming of the mad soirees soon to be hosted around her new wet bar. I gotta tell you, la Booker—that wit! That breezy insouciance!—is a tough act to follow, but I’ll do my best not to bring shame and ignominy on the house of Booker.
In the Hinterlands, our conversation is all about (well, mostly about, because I do tend to digress on matters of gardening, or to check in with Simon at 75 Degrees South ( (speaking of which, cop this QuickTime vid. of a winter storm in the land WAY down under—someone pass the cocoa and the long undies!)) or a WhipPoorWill in Canada or Fred in Floyd)…..
I’m sorry, where was I? Oh yes. Nonfiction. We’re all about that in the Hinterlands—except, as noted, when we’re not. I’m distractible, you see. One minute I’m deep in a discussion of new and coming nonfiction and the next I’m watching ”Great Moments in Musical Theater Featuring Eggs: Part Three” over at The Amateur Gourmet (egg-box chorus in the microwave—nice piece of staging, Adam.) Or reading this week’s installment of The Guardian’s Digested Read (“the must-read books in just 400 words”), which unfailingly sends up every book it covers, fiction and non-.
But I digress. “Why nonfiction?” you might ask. Or, you might not, but let’s pretend you did so I can segue neatly to the next paragraph.
Gosh, glad you asked. You see, way back in Ye College Days (mine, that is), in a liberal-arts New England potted-ivy ivory tower institute of higher learning, “I want to be a writer” pretty much meant that you were going to write fiction. Or possibly poetry, but for all that we English majors were up to our necks in poets dead (most of ‘em), living (rarely), and Canonical (the culture wars had not yet crashed our gates; the only person I knew reading Derrida was a religion major), I don’t recall any aspiring poets. (Having said that, I immediately think of Caragh O’Brien and Jessie Grearson. Or maybe it’s just that we were all in Larry Raab’s “Contemporary American Poetry”—i.e. Poets Who Drank Themselves to Death And/Or Committed Suicide—class together. Or maybe it’s just that “Caragh” sounds like a poet and Jessie looked like one.)
So: writer=fiction it was to be, except for the minor drawback that my fiction sucked. I kept lifting stories from “real life”—a breakup, a friend’s road trip, the bizarre death of one of my father’s parishioners—and trying to turn them into fiction. (For that last one, as I recall, my writing prof., Jim Shepard, described the characters as “reptilian.” No, sorry, correct that: the reptilians were the family blown away by a tornado in a grotesque-parody-of-Southern-gothic-story I actually invented. And you see how that was a raving success. ) I ought to have known.
But despite having read all the Tom Wolfe “new journalism” I could lay my hands on, despite reading Joan Didion’s essays, despite my exposure-by-subscription to the narrative nonfiction in Harper’s, The Atlantic, and the New Yorker, my “aha” moment didn’t come until midwinter evening in my mid-twenties when I was lying on the bathroom floor in the throes of a gut bug and whiling away the nausea reading a New Yorker essay about employees folding sweaters at Benetton. I can’t say that I leapt up at the time shouting “Eureka!”, which, given how my insides were actively trying to get outside, would have been a regrettable course of action to pursue anyway. But the “ping,” the lightbulb going off—this moment was that moment. I wanted to be the kind of writer who wrote stories about things like employees folding sweaters at Benetton.
It’s what I call “the extraordinariness of ordinary life,” or, as Susan Orlean puts it, “There's nothing more exotic or strange than looking into another person's life – and finding this world that was right next to me.” Think of how ordinary things—carpet fibers, say, or the contours of your skin—are rendered mysterious and strange and wonderful under high-powered magnification. That’s nonfiction to me.
When people ask me why I write narrative nonfiction, I say that it sings to me in a way that no other kind of writing does. Why is that so? I don’t know. Why is one person drawn to sci-fi, another to poetry? It’s one of those mysteries of life, like where socks disappear to in the dryer and how George Bush got reelected.
To reveal the everyday extraordinary, all those worlds around us hiding in plain view, to make employees folding sweaters at Benetton read like something more than a training manual, is the art and the challenge of good narrative nonfiction. Or, to quote S. Orlean again, “So much of its success relies on its execution.” The best narrative nonfiction (which is the kind of nonfiction I love best, and if you want my own highly subjective take on nonfiction’s finer distinctions, see here) brings all the craft and art of language and style and structure you’d expect in good fiction to telling nonfiction stories.
There are some writers and critics who seem determined to prevail in some sort of imagined literary world debate-club competition with the argument that fiction is “better” than nonfiction, or more of an “art,” or that it somehow is uniquely qualified to Illuminate the Human Condition—whatever that means. I’ve never understood the point of mounting this argument. One might equally argue that since fiction is fabricated out of a writer’s imagination then the only thing it illuminates is the inside of the author’s head. But that would be silly. Literature is not “Survivor.” No one is voting Anna Karenina off the island so that John McPhee may triumph. Read what you like. Write what sings to you.
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