I Could Write a Book. Maybe. But Not Now.

I’ve felt a little out of place since I learned that I’m the only member of my writers’ workshop who isn’t working on Writing A Book, and it’s made me re-examine just why I signed up for it. I know I was fueled by my enthusiasm over Beth Kephart’s writing instruction, as conveyed through Handling the Truth, at the time (and that I wanted some sort of proxy for a class with her), but my main motivation was that it felt like a necessary next step in my development as a writer. On further reflection--which was actually required by our second-week workshop assignment--I’m not sure that I had any other motivations:

“I signed up for this because I’ve never really been part of a writing group, and I hope to learn just as much, if not more, from reading and responding to everyone else’s work than I do from writing my own.

“My primary goal for my writing is to Do It Better. Along those lines, some of my sub-goals pertaining to this workshop in particular are somewhat technical in nature. I want to be more expressive, sometimes in fewer words. I want to be more concise when it’s appropriate. I’d like to learn more effective ways of writing objectively without falling into the passive voice. I’d like to work on making my writing sound like me without necessarily making it about me. And when it IS about me, I’d like to be able to say it in a way that fosters better connection with the reader.”

We’re halfway through our fall session now, and we’ve progressively narrowed our focus from broad consideration of the Writing Process to the elements of crafting a piece--drafting, revising and structuring, trying not to lose sight of what our our leader/coach Jane calls “The Big Four” of writing:

• First and most important, there must be some purpose to what you’re writing.
• Second, that there is an audience for your writing.  Not some amorphous They Out There, but real people (even if they exist only in your imagination) that you are writing to. 
• Third, there is a message that you are looking to get across to that audience.  
• Finally, there is your persona as a writer, the you that comes across on the page, your Voice for that particular piece of prose.

“Purpose, audience, message, persona: they are woven together, are often interdependent, and the successful realization of them usually determines the success of the particular piece of writing. You may not think of The Big Four every, or any, time that you’re writing, but if you get stuck, I guarantee you that one of them needs attention.”

I have lots of short-term writing end-products (blog posts, book reviews, that sort of thing), but no large-scale grandly ambitious end-product. Perhaps the small ones will build toward a big one--a Book!?--someday, but right now I’m not seeing it, and the Big Four have helped me understand why I don't:

• Right now, I don’t have a purpose/mission that requires a book to convey it
• Without a purpose, I can’t get a sense of whether there’s an audience at all, let alone whom it might be
• My message depends on why I want to put it out there and who I want to read it
• I need to know what my message is in order to find the appropriate persona to deliver it

I’m not yet in a place, as a writer, where I’m ready to apply those considerations to anything more than several hundred words at a time. I’m not sure I ever will be, and I’m not sure I ever have to be.

My purpose in writing that here is to help myself accept that this is OK, and to share that with you, my readers. I consider many of you my friends, and as my friends, I thought you might be interested to know how this project is going. It is feeding my development as a writer, which is what I hoped it would do--but right now, it’s not going toward Writing A Book.

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(Semi)Wordless Wednesday: Costume Party

The prompt for the Wordless Wednesday Linky Group this week is "Halloween." I confess that I've never been a very big fan of Halloween, but at my relatively advanced age, I have grown to enjoy the fun of dressing up in costumes. These beauties are not mine--they were worn by Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love--but they wouldn't be out of place at the RenFaire.

This gown and riding habit could be yours for a minimum bid of $5000 each.

"What Dreams Are Made Of: A Century of Movie Magic at Auction As Curated by Turner Classic Movies" opens November 25 at Bonhams New York. It cost us nothing to see this rare movie memorabilia collection at a public preview last weekend in Los Angeles. It will be on view again in New York City for five days before bidding opens--if you're a movie nut, you need to see this!

(This post was sponsored by no one, and all photos and opinions are my own.)

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(Audio)Book Talk: FIVE DAYS AT MEMORIAL, by Sheri Fink

Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Sheri Fink (Twitter) (Facebook)

Audiobook read by Kirsten Potter

Crown (September 2013), Hardcover (ISBN 0307718964 / 9780307718969)

Nonfiction (social science/health), 576 pages

Source: Purchased audiobook (Random House Audio (September 2013) ISBN 978-0-8041-2810-0; Audible ASIN B00EF870X8)

Reason for reading: Personal interest

From the Prologue: “For certain New Orleanians, Memorial Medical Center was the place you went to ride out each hurricane that the loop current of the Gulf of Mexico launched like a pinball at the city. But chances are you wouldn’t call it Memorial Medical Center. You’d call it 'Baptist,' its nickname since it had existed as Southern Baptist Hospital. Working a hurricane at 317-bed Baptist meant bringing along kids, parents and grandparents, dogs, cats and rabbits, and coolers and grocery bags packed with party chips, cheese dip, and muffulettas. You’d probably show up even if you weren’t on duty. If you were a doctor and had outpatients who were unwell, you might check them in too, believing Baptist to be a safer refuge than their homes. Then you’d settle down on a cot or an air mattress, and the hurricane, which always seemed to hit at night, would rage against the hospital and leave. The next day, the sun would rise and you would help clean up the debris and go home.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website 

In the tradition of the best investigative journalism, physician and reporter Sheri Fink reconstructs 5 days at Memorial Medical Center and draws the reader into the lives of those who struggled mightily to survive and to maintain life amid chaos.          

 After Katrina struck and the floodwaters rose, the power failed, and the heat climbed, exhausted caregivers chose to designate certain patients last for rescue. Months later, several health professionals faced criminal allegations that they deliberately injected numerous patients with drugs to hasten their deaths. 

Five Days at Memorial, the culmination of six years of reporting, unspools the mystery of what happened in those days, bringing the reader into a hospital fighting for its life and into a conversation about the most terrifying form of health care rationing. 

In a voice at once involving and fair, masterful and intimate, Fink exposes the hidden dilemmas of end-of-life care and reveals just how ill-prepared we are in America for the impact of large-scale disasters—and how we can do better.  A remarkable book, engrossing from start to finish, Five Days at Memorial radically transforms your understanding of human nature in crisis.

(Thanks to Kim for our brief e-mail exchange about Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial, which we both read--unplanned--around the same time. I’m using it as the basis for my comments on this remarkable book, which I hereby designate “The Most Important Book I’ll Read This Year.” UPDATED 11/10/2013 to link to Kim's review, which also draws on our discussion.)

Comments: What made Hurricane Katrina’s encounter with the city of New Orleans so memorably destructive was not so much the storm itself as the flooding from the levee collapse that followed it, which wasn’t anticipated (despite decades of infrastructure neglect) and further confused the emergency response. I knew this in general terms before I read Five Days at Memorial, but I didn’t know a lot of the details, and I don’t recall hearing much about what happened at Memorial and other hospitals at all.

What happened at Memorial Medical Center between August 27 and September 1, 2005 is a story of heroism and tragedy. The five-day process of evacuating staff, patients, and visitors from the flooded, blacked-out hospital is a chronicle of difficult decisions made under terrible conditions; while some had fortunate outcomes, they were overshadowed by the choices that turned out spectacularly badly. While administrators and physicians managed to ensure that “no living patient (was) left behind,” more than 40 bodies, including nine patients from LifeCare, a separate acute-care hospital occupying Memorial’s seventh floor, were found inside the building following the evacuation.

The medical staff’s decision to get patients with the best prognosis out first was based on a “survival mode” mindset--and not just patients’ survival, as rumors of martial law, abandonment by the authorities, and neighborhood violence caused members of the hospital staff to fear for their own lives. But the survival of those in the worst condition became increasingly precarious as time went on, and post-mortem examinations determined that most of the deaths occurred during the last twenty-four hours before evacuation was complete. Those findings raised questions--of medical malpractice and misconduct at least, criminal behavior at worst--which coalesced around cancer surgeon Anna Pou and two Memorial ICU nurses.

The medical/legal drama inherent in this story make Five Days at Memorial compelling reading, but what elevates the book to Important is the way that the incidents it relates provide an intense, concentrated perspective on larger issues; it presents potential case studies on medical ethics, disaster management, socioeconomic class and community relations. The focus it gives to questions relevant to the current national health-care debate is particularly notable. It’s impossible to ignore that health-care rationing essentially became standard operating procedure under these admittedly extreme conditions; does that set precedent for medical decisions made in non-crisis mode...or are these literally life-and-death questions always crisis choices, by their very nature?

Sheri Fink originally reported on what happened at Memorial, and the legal and medical fallout from those events, in 2009, and builds from there in this book. There are many sides to this complex story, as this much-expanded account makes clear. In some instances Fink is (deliberately?) vague about identifying people, and in others she offers detailed biography; I assumed that when participants weren’t named it was probably because she hadn’t been able to use them as primary sources, or that they wanted to be off the record if she had. I didn’t really get a strong sense of her own interpretation of events--and as an M.D. as well as a journalist, I can’t imagine she doesn’t have one--but I think that’s appropriate. Fink’s presentation is strikingly--perhaps frustratingly--even-handed, and I appreciated that she didn’t editorialize.

Although I read this in audio, I don’t know whether I’d recommend that format over print; it is a complex story, and it can be easier to stay on track in heavy fact-based narrative nonfiction when you can flip back through pages (or screens, in e-book format) to check on things--but it's also a chunkster, and I seem to find long books easier to digest in audio lately. That said, I was surprised by how well this big, complicated book worked in audio format, and I think I got a stronger appreciation of just how Fink constructed all of this into a narrative from listening to it--from hearing it as story--than I might have from reading it. There was repetition of identifying details in the audio that might have annoyed me in print--at times I felt like telling my iPhone “Yes, I know who that is”--but there really were a lot of people to keep straight, so that was ultimately more helpful than irritating. It seems to me that the audio narrator of non-memoir nonfiction has a particular challenge to make the material hold the listener’s attention without really “performing” it; Kirsten Potter did an excellent job of staying out of the story’s way.

Decide for yourself what format would work best for you, but decide to read Five Days at Memorial. It’s fascinating, aggravating, heartbreaking, eye-opening, thought-provoking...and Important.

Rating: Book 4.25 of 5; Audio 4 of 5

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Flashback Friday: Casual Meets Cosplay

It is a total cheat to call this a Flashback Friday shot, since I just took it this morning...but because I am wearing a time machine, I'm taking it. The "Exploding TARDIS" pencil skirt, with its Van Gogh-inspired print referencing the Series 5 episode "Vincent and the Doctor," is letting me sneak a little cosplay into the office today. (30 days till the Doctor Who 50th-anniversary special, y'all!)

Also flashing back this Friday:

Desiree
Kim

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Sign of a Tourist: Or, A Day in Hollywood

When you see this sign, you know where you are

I’ve lived more than half my life in places where one of the leading industries is tourism. As a teenager on Florida’s Gulf Coast, I mocked it--”tourist trap” was an insult applied to places residents wouldn’t go and activities they wouldn’t do. As a thirtysomething in Memphis--Tennessee’s other "Music City"--I visited Graceland only in the company of out-of-town visitors, but I worked at one of the city’s other leading tourist attractions, the Memphis Zoo, for four years. However, in a decade of living just outside Los Angeles, I've learned to appreciate that people travel hundreds (or thousands) of miles to see and do things that are just down the road from me--and that sometimes it’s a lot of fun to see my city through their eyes.

My husband and I like to play local tourists at least a few times a year, and since we’re both big movie and pop-culture buffs, we especially enjoy exploring things to do in and around Hollywood. We took a day off not long ago to do just that, and we thought we’d start it with the neighborhood’s signature attraction, the Hollywood sign itself.

Hollywood Walk of Fame, DIY-style

You can see those big white letters on the hills from many spots in the city, but it’s hard to get very close to them. A search for “directions to the Hollywood sign” will get you into the neighborhood by car, but once you’re there--and assuming you’re able to score one of the scarce parking spaces without blocking someone’s driveway--you’ve still got a dusty, winding climb up Mount Lee ahead of you. We thought we were up for the challenge. We learned pretty quickly that we were wrong--the directions we were using told us that it was a 40-minute hike to the sign at the top, and we barely lasted for 10. Fortunately, there are plenty of good picture spots even lower down the hill, and we decided we were fine with that. It’s still closer than most people get.

We left the hills for Hollywood Boulevard, where the terrain is flatter but

the crowds are thicker; both places can be a challenge to navigate, but offer plenty of sights to see. We pretty much stuck to the sights on the street along the Walk of Fame this time--the weather was nearly perfect for being outside, walking around and people-watching--but we’ll be back in a few weeks to check out the Hollywood Wax Museum, where visitors have been getting close to (replicas of the) stars for almost 50 years. As it happens, I work in Hollywood--just a couple of blocks off Hollywood Boulevard--but there’s nothing “Hollywood” about my work, and so I enjoy going there for reasons that are not about work and mostly all about “Hollywood.”

I was selected for this opportunity as a member of Clever Girls Collective and the content and opinions expressed here are all my own.

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WW: Gourds Gone Wild!

Well, these were pretty laid back, from what I could tell--just hanging out at the mall...

This week's Wordless Wednesday Linky Group theme was suggested by Susanna.

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Book Talk: SAFFRON CROSS, by J. Dana Trent

Saffron Cross: The Unlikely Story of How a Christian Minister Married a Hindu Monk
J. Dana Trent (Facebook) (Twitter)
Fresh Air Books (2013), trade paper (ISBN 1935205161 / 9781935205166)
Nonfiction: memoir/spirituality, 144 pages

A version of this review was previously published in Shelf Awareness for Readers (October 18, 2013). Shelf Awareness provided a publisher-furnished galley to facilitate the review and compensation for the review they received and published.

She was nurtured by one small-town Baptist church, formed by another, and ordained as a minister at the age of twenty-one, shortly before entering the graduate program at Duke Divinity School. Dana Trent struggled with her faith sometimes, but her experience and worldview were solidly Christian. When she signed up with an online-dating site and completed her profile, she could hardly imagine being matched with someone from a different background, and was astonished to be introduced to a former monk--and a Hindu monk, at that.

Saffron Cross is Trent's account of the early years of her relationship with her husband Fred, who had learned that while the monastic life didn't suit him, the spiritual practices of Hinduism most certainly did. While marriages between people from different religious traditions are increasingly common, the partners usually have some shared frame of reference; Dana and Fred barely speak the same spiritual language. Learning to communicate across the gulf between their belief systems adds another layer to the everyday challenges of newlywed life, and at times Dana wonders whether they can make their East-West interfaith marriage work without compromising their individual values. She'll eventually realize that her Christian spiritual journey is enriched, not diminished, by the influence of her husband's Hinduism.

Trent's story is one in which the personal is not so much political as it is ecumenical, and in the widest possible way. In Saffron Cross, she introduces readers to the Hindu beliefs and practices she has learned through Fred, and explores how they have reshaped and strengthened her own Christianity. This is not "A Guide to Making Your Interfaith Marriage Work," but as Trent works through how she and her husband have made their interfaith marriage work, Saffron Cross develops into a genuinely inspiring and enlightening story.

Opening lines: "While the rest of America digested fried turkey, I sat at a computer in the apartment I shared with my mother and checked several hundred boxes describing my temperament and habits. I pored over endless squares indicating my desires in a partner: values, physical attributes, nature, habits, spirituality, religion, or lack thereof. I worked hard to spare myself from a psychopathic, balding smoker with a TV addiction and moved onto more sacred matters.The eHarmony television commercials had been enticing: a silver-haired Dr. Neil Clark Warren boasted that, for the price of new shoes, his lengthy questionnaire would help me meet the love of my life."

Book description, from the publisher's website:

Dana Trent regales us with the intriguing story of how she, a minister ordained in the Southern Baptist tradition, fell in love with and married Fred Eaker, a devout Hindu and former monk. After meeting on eHarmony, the couple begins a sometimes daunting but ultimately inspiring journey of interfaith relationship and marriage. From her sex-free honeymoon to her struggles with curbing cheeseburger cravings while adjusting to vegetarianism, Trent’s refreshingly honest and often hilarious vignettes offer a glimpse into the challenges of bringing two vastly different spiritual paths together in one household.

The most surprising part of their journey? Dana’s relationship with her Hindu husband helps her cultivate a deeper walk with God.

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Friday Flashback: 7th* Anniversary Edition

Seven* years ago this weekend, this guy and I married each other. We're both taking the day off on Monday, our actual anniversary, to wander around town and enjoy each other's company. I don't think we'll get quite this dressed up, though.

26--Happy Anniversary! Love you, 28

*edited because 2006 was 7 years ago, not 8, and this accountant can't do mental arithmetic

Florinda and Paul
Saturday, October 21, 2006
The Westlake Village Inn
Westlake Village, California

Also flashing back today:

Kim, putting another dime in the jukebox

Desiree, visiting Yosemite twice in the autumn and ten years apart

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BOOKKEEPING: Reading, Listening, Watching, Writing

I haven’t checked in at the Sunday Salon for a few weeks now, other than that time I talked about why this reader writes, and it looks like I won’t get there this weekend either (a houseguest through Sunday night, and a day off with Tall Paul on Monday), so I thought I’d do a little Bookkeeping here today.

Reading I’m performing a potentially dangerous bit of book juggling right now--I’ve got three print books underway. I’m pushing through some November literary fiction to review for Shelf Awareness, alternating with Patty Chang Anker’s Some Nerve: Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave. I usually shy away from self-help, but Anker blends it with memoir in this born-on-a-blog book project, and it’s striking some nerves (pun mostly intended) with me. I started both of them on the same day I opened the one book I deliberately picked out to read during this Halloween month, The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman...and soon decided I would save that one for last. I have a feeling I’m going to want to give it more exclusive attention. (And yes, you know all this book-reading means that my blog-reading is slacking.)

By the way, the Book Review Archive is up to date through this week, and can now be sorted on author name and review year in addition to title and classification.

Listening  I’m about ⅔ through the audiobook version of Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, Sheri Fink’s account of the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina at New Orleans’ former Baptist Hospital. It’s by turns infuriating and heartbreaking, incorporating issues of ethics, class, and race into a complex story of terrible conditions and impossible decisions. It’s absolutely fascinating and very thought-provoking. Kim recently finished reading it too, and I’m hoping for a little cross-blog book talk about it with her!

Watching  The only new TV show that’s gotten much attention around my house is Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D….and in truth, I’m only mildly attached to it at this point (and more excited about the return of Arrow for its second season). Otherwise, it’s mostly sitcoms, including the stockpiling of new Parks and Recreation episodes on the DVR until we finish watching the previous season on Netflix. Right now, I strongly suspect that the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who is going to be the highlight of my autumn, TV-wise.

Writing I’m in the third week of my online writing workshop, and the only member of our small group who isn’t in the midst of trying to write Something Major (one’s just started a book, one’s been at it for a while, and one’s branching into fiction). Each of us is supposed to be working one-on-one with our coach on our personal WIP, in addition to our weekly writing assignments (some of which I’ll share here) and video meetings via Google Hangout--and since I don’t have one, I’m stressing a bit over it! On the other hand, this certainly gives me a goal, doesn’t it? “A Writing Project That Isn’t My Blog.” I’m in the prewriting phase on that now.

What's keeping you busy right now?

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WW: Hot in Here!

...Well, I'm assuming this guy stripped down to cool down...

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Book Talk: THE GIRL YOU LEFT BEHIND, by Jojo Moyes

The Girl You Left Behind

Jojo Moyes (Twitter) (Facebook)

Pamela Dornan Books (August 2013), hardcover (ISBN 0670026611 / 9780670026616)

Fiction (historical), 384 pages

Source: Publisher

Reason for reading: She Reads Book Club October selection

Opening lines:

“I was dreaming of food. Crisp baguettes, the flesh of the bread a virginal white, still steaming from the oven, and ripe cheese, its borders creeping toward the edge of the plate. Grapes and plums, stacked high in bowls, dusky and fragrant, their scent filling the air. I was about to reach out and take one, when my sister stopped me. ‘Get off,’ I murmured. ‘I’m hungry.’

“‘Sophie. Wake up.’

“I could taste that cheese. I was going to have a mouthful of Reblochon, smear it on a hunk of that warm bread, then pop a grape into my mouth. I could already taste the intense sweetness, smell the rich aroma.

“But there it was, my sister’s hand on my wrist, stopping me. The plates were disappearing, the scents fading. I reached out to them but they began to pop, like soap bubbles.”

Book description, from the publisher’s website:France, 1916:  Artist Edouard Lefevre leaves his young wife, Sophie, to fight at the front. When their small town falls to the Germans in the midst of World War I, Edouard’s portrait of Sophie draws the eye of the new Kommandant. As the officer’s dangerous obsession deepens, Sophie will risk everything—her family, her reputation, and her life—to see her husband again. 

Almost a century later, Sophie’s portrait is given to Liv Halston by her young husband shortly before his sudden death. A chance encounter reveals the painting’s true worth, and a battle begins for who its legitimate owner is—putting Liv’s belief in what is right to the ultimate test.

Comments: Almost everyone I know who read Jojo Moyes’ last novel, Me Before You, loved it. I haven’t read it, other than an excerpt from the week it was the Fiction selection at the DearReader.com e-mail book club, which I have to confess didn’t leave me panting to read more. (Please don’t hate me.) Therefore, I was probably less enthusiastic than most members of the She Reads Book Club when Moyes’ latest, The Girl You Left Behind, was made our October selection, and I admit I approached it with some degree of prejudice. When I said last week that there are times I feel flat-out bored with fiction, this was the kind of fiction I had in mind.

And here’s where I admit that my prejudices were unfair, and that I’m glad to say I was wrong. The Girl You Left Behind wasn’t what I expected, and I was pleasantly surprised by that. Moyes has crafted an unusual dual-narrative blend of historical fiction and legal thriller that grapples with some of moral and ethical questions arising from the effects of war and keeps the modern-day romantic thread from overwhelming the rest of the story. Since I frankly considered that thread the weakest and most predictable element of the novel, I appreciated that.

Moyes’ great strength here is the development of her protagonists. Sophie and Liv, her two primary characters separated by nearly a century and connected by nothing more tangible than a painting, emerge as women facing down very different difficult circumstances each in her own way. Neither always makes the best choices, but the choices they do make feel true to both character and context. The narrative switches between past and present at well-timed intervals that kept me engaged as a reader, while my interest in the characters and the high quality of Moyes’ writing helped divert me from some predictable plotting.

The Girl You Left Behind wasn’t a “love” for me, but it was definitely a “like more than I thought I would,” and I consider that a pretty good response. That said, please check out what other She Reads bloggers had to say, because you’ll probably find quite a few who liked it more than I did.

Rating: 3.5 of 5

   

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WW Wild Card: Only in LA...

...do fictional Realtors from TV sitcoms get bus-bench ads like real-life Realtors do.

Phil Dunphy's bench, on Franklin Avenue east of Highland

"Watch a new episode of Modern Family tonight on ABC!" 

If you want. Or DVR it and watch it later--that's what I'll do. Or watch something else.

(This post is sponsored by absolutely no one, in case you couldn't tell.)

An InLinkz Link-up

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Handling the (Reading) Truth: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Me (Part 2 of 2)

To pick up where we left off, I can tell you exactly when my reading preferences shifted from almost exclusively fiction to avoiding fiction as much as possible--it was late 1999, into early 2000 (I would say the "turn of the millennium," but it was actually a year earlier)--and I can tell you exactly why.

My husband (not the one I have now, in case that doesn't quickly become obvious) started a relationship with another woman that fall, and we separated shortly before Christmas. The separation lasted not quite six months, but I’m not sure you can say we truly “reconciled,” other than to the reality that our marriage was down for the count (although it would be nearly a year and a half later before we officially ended it). That full story is for another time and place--assuming I ever bring myself to tell it at all--but what’s relevant to this story is that, as you might imagine, I was in a place of major emotional pain, and I was there for quite a long time. And when that pain was strongest, I had to stop reading fiction. 

Considering that my preferred fiction is of the character-centric literary variety, it's not surprising that it became a problem for me to read it under those emotional conditions. As noted in this response to a recent study establishing a link between reading literary fiction and social and emotional intelligence,

"Reading sensitive and lengthy explorations of people’s lives, that kind of fiction is literally putting yourself into another person’s position — lives that could be more difficult, more complex, more than what you might be used to in popular fiction. It makes sense that they will find that, yeah, that can lead to more empathy and understanding of other lives.”

It was too much empathy for me to handle. Most of the conflict and drama in character-driven fiction comes through relationships, and until you have reason to notice it, you might not actually notice how much of that relationship drama is between spouses or romantic partners. I noticed. And I really didn’t need to spend time in the hearts and minds of characters in the midst of that drama--no matter their outcome, it rubbed salt into my own wounds.

Reading fiction had grown more uncomfortable than reading nonfiction, but not reading at all was absolutely not an option, and so I branched out. I'd always had some interest in history and biography, but I developed a sort of recency bias and wanted to read about people and events from the soon-to-end twentieth century more than those of earlier times. Although I found most “inspirational” books a bit off-putting (and still do), my own questioning about faith and religion led me to the “religious studies” shelves and to “faith” memoirs, which are more often about the writer’s own continuing questions rather than laying out answers. Those clicked. Thoughtful--and sometimes fun--books about popular culture clicked. I discovered topical narrative nonfiction, and learned that essays didn’t have to be dry and academic. Nonfiction could tell stories too, and sometimes they were even more fascinating and full of wonder than fictional ones--and it didn't feel so much like any particular trick or special skill was necessary to read and appreciate those stories. And when I wanted to get inside someone else’s head again, there was memoir. The genre was still emerging then, and when it explored relationships, they were more likely to be those of youth than of marriage--that wasn’t so hard to take, and as I started to understand how the form differed from autobiography, I finally started to get the point of it.

When I was able to bring fiction back into my reading rotation, it was different, and some of those changes have stuck for over a decade now. I’ve grown lukewarm about a lot of “women’s fiction,” and fiction where infidelity or marital struggle is a central theme can still be difficult for me; this has pushed me to broaden my fiction-reading horizons, so I can’t really see it as a bad thing. What does seem like a not-so-good thing is that there are times I feel out-and-out bored with fiction. Perhaps at least part of this comes from nearly five decades of reading it, but sometimes I feel like I’m just seeing tweaks to the same stories I’ve read so many times before. Maybe that’s because there really are only so many stories in the human experience, but there are times I catch myself thinking that I’ve read some of them enough already.

As my fiction fever cools, I’m discovering that more and more of the books that excite me and jump onto my wish list are nonfiction. Narrative nonfiction, topical nonfiction, and cultural histories tend to grab me quickly, and I remain interested in biography and memoir.  My reading tastes have shifted before, and they may again; it’s all part of a reader’s evolution, isn’t it?  I doubt I’d ever quit fiction entirely, but at this stage of my reading life, I’m happier mixing things up.

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