The Situation and the Story Audiobook By Vivian Gornick cover art

The Situation and the Story

The Art of Personal Narrative

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The Situation and the Story

By: Vivian Gornick
Narrated by: Vivian Gornick
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All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator, but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.

How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks—and answers. Taking us on a tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.

This book is itself a model of the lucid intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

©2001 Vivian Gornick (P)2022 Tantor Literary History & Criticism United States Words, Language & Grammar World Literature Writing & Publishing Nonfiction

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If you write, you should follow along (well, just listen to this book at least) and take notes and highlight areas the you know you need to work on in your own craft.

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I really wanted to like this. I didn't. I really wanted to be helped by this. I wasn't. But because of the book's (and author's) reputation and my desire to improve my writing skills, I will read it again - not just on Audible and Kindle but perhaps even paperback. Hopefully, I'll come away with much more the next time.

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