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Vivian Gornick

Vivian Gornick Quotes

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Famous Vivian Gornick Quotes

“In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.”

WritingSelfMemoirWriting CraftWriting MemoirMemoir As Literature
Book:The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
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“In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the "other" as the other might see him or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing. When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir - where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster - the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.”

EmpathyMemoirMemoir WritingEssayEssay WritingNarratorPersonal NarrativeCreating Dimension In Character
Book:The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
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“The presence in a memoir or an essay of the truth speaker - the narrator that a writer pulls out of his or her own agitated and boring self to organize a piece of experience - it was about this alone that I felt I had something to say; and it was to those works in which such a narrator comes through strong and clear that I was invariably drawn.”

InspirationMemoirEssayCreative NonfictionEssay WritingNarratorPersonal Narrative
Book:The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
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“A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

LifeWritingTryingBelieveMatterHardHandsTruthAbleHappenedAchieveEventsSeriousBearsReaderReflectionExperienceDefinitionsMemoirWitnessMake SenseWhat MattersReflectingEssayistsRecitalsSerious Life
Author:Vivian Gornick
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