yeah, yeah. it's interesting. i think i'm sorry. i think that may be our last question. do we have time for right. if there's anything you. i guess the blue angels will start. yeah. great timing. so i want to thank a little quake so much for having us here for that to the san francisco public library. thank you all for being here. and thank you so much to our panelists. please, their books are for sale upfront. please our authors and please support the independent presses and the rest of your day at litecoin. thank you. yeah and, and welcome to, to our panel we're all looking forward to. i think before we start we're

going to do our own bios, if that's okay. and begin with you, lindsey oh yeah. sorry. you can hear me now. yes it can. everyone hear. me now. how about that. how about that. okay. austin hi there, i'm lindsey crittendon. i'm a i am writer of both narrative nonfiction, mostly memoir fiction. my book of short stories is called the view from below, and was published by a very small about 25 years ago. and my memoir, water will hold you was, published by a bigger company about. 18 years ago, and i teach the writer's grotto. i'm a member of the writer's grotto. i write personal essays and and short stories. i'm i'm excited to be here with my friend rachel and with tom to talk about. i think a really meaty and interesting topic. so thank you all for coming? hi, i'm rachel howard and.

it's funny how it brings us back together. was just telling tom that lindsay and i were in writer's gosh 20 years ago while i was writing my memoir and while lindsay was writing her memoir. and we were actually the earliest some of the earliest readers for each other. and i just ended up rereading her memoir the water will hold you about three months ago. and because years had passed, it was all new me again, and it was so beautiful and i was so stunned. and i was like, i can't believe was part of that. as you were writing that huge part of so. so yeah, used to live in san francisco. i now live in davis. i have written a lot of journalism, which is connecting with tom about that, also wrote journalism and will probably talking a lot, writing from fact writing fiction, how both of those relate to art. is it different? is it similar. i wrote some fiction around that time that i was starting in journalism, and then wrote a

memoir about my father's unsolved murder, which i was there for. it happened our house at four in the morning in the central valley at ten, and i was ten years old, and it's still never been. so that was my first book, a memoir. and then i've written short stories, essays, a lot of dance criticism for the chronicle, actually and then in 2019, when i came out with a book that might gone a different path towards nonfiction, but it ended up being a novel. so that's where i am today, right? i'm tom barbash and i began as a newspaper reporter after college. i worked for three years for the syracuse post-standard and then started writing fiction. i have two novels, a book of short stories and one nonfiction book about counterfeits. jerrold and 911. and i've also written a lot of essays and nonfiction for things like men's journal and mcsweeney's. and and i teach at california of the arts, which i strongly

recommend people find out about art courses and programs and readings. but i love this subject and in part because when i teach my students, i really encourage them to be men and women of letters. you know, and to think about about what that means you know, because a lot of the stories, if you've got skills as a novelist i think it carries over into work of nonfiction. i also think it improves poetry out of a sense of narrative. if you're a poet, it helps with language, you know, in the other disciplines. but i'm so happy. be with these two writers, you know, in talking about, i guess, what we were talking about is how do you when it's right to write something as fiction or nonfiction and i know lindsay, you had some thoughts about that too. if you want to kick us off here. sure. i think for me, it kind of comes down to voice and when i start something, i generally have this sort of inchoate sense that is

either going to be something i'm going to explore or in a nonfiction or something i'm going to make into. and it has a lot to do with voice. and it's it's kind of hard to talk about voice because, you know, without looking at examples. but i think the voice that i write in when i write narrative nonfiction, again, most of my narrative nonfiction has been memoir is, unsurprisingly, a kind of more confessional voice. and the fiction voice is often more a persona or often more sort of a point of view. other than my own, even though it's very much mine. i don't that doesn't sound to that, you know, makes sense. and i also, with fiction, sometimes i get an image and i'll just kind of, huh, i want to know more about that image. why is that boy standing in front of the door? what that cat doing on the lawn? who's watching cat and and the or i have an interest.

one time i drove home from a rafting trip with an archeologist. i was just finding out about archeology, and it fascinated me. and the next morning i sat down and started writing a story. i had no what it would be about. but i just started writing about archeology. this this guy had told me. and then i found myself studying it in bodie, which i don't know if any of, you know, is a ghost town in the eastern sierra near bridgeport. and all of a sudden i had this story with. this woman had been sent to bodie to look for obsidian. so. so those things start fiction and i think non for me memoir for me comes from a personal experience that i don't want to say, i'm trying to figure out because that sounds a little, i don't know, laboratory like, but something that's kind of haunting me or stuck me and that i just find i have to kind write about and it so it comes more from and surprisingly personal experience great rachel to address too. yeah so fiction or nonfiction

and finding which i settle into for project for me is about voice which is also about relationship my reader and also relationship with myself. and to kind of come back to like the topic and the framing of this panel right, is nonfiction literature, the intersection of fact art, right? we talked about that. so what constitutes literature and right and so and there's, i think so. jason roberts who couldn't be here today he wrote a beautiful book that just out his second of nonfiction that i would say is every living thing. it's pure nonfiction narrative. the two great minds of time who are trying to categorize as everything on earth. and one became famous and one didn't. and there's great narrative there of like a reversal who should have been known and who shouldn't and how that intersects with how we think about science today is a beautifully crafted narrative

that i would say is art. but just to kind of take on like the status of art for a moment and how that's kind of embedded in what we're talking about, i definitely was one of those people when i was i wanted to write art without being able it. i mean, it's impossible define and i definitely thought of fiction as the higher form out of nonfiction even though i was a journalist and going into journalism and yet my my first book was a memoir and that had do with my relationship with the reader and my relationship with myself. so when i tried it as novel, which i did for a number of years, i was in my early twenties, it just would not work because it was about my unsolved murder and for that novel to be about the murder i actually really needed to like, project out and know who did it. and be able to tell the whole story of that. and i couldn't because the whole

reason i wanted to tell the story is that i didn't know how to live with not knowing who did it. and that was actually the impulse and so that needed to be relationship to the reader. so that they could watch me push through trying to face that question. and then facing that question became the final narrative turn of that book was that book. i would say that of it that i'm really proud of to me did satisfy that and other parts where was a more developing writer and pushing through a first draft. it's very subjective. there are other parts of it to are not at my own standard for art is today which kind of comes to this question of gay. so i looked up merriam-webster, right? it's written material, especially superior or lasting merit. so that could or could not be art, but the subtitle today is exploring the intersection of

fact art. so i think that jason meant to us to define literature as art today and thinking about that to prepare, and also then thinking about the that became a novel. so going the other way, i started in nonfiction writing about children and care and how how hard it is for a child in foster care to get adopted into a family and how difficult it is on those oh, a little bit sorry. because because the pressures are so and so. i tried some on that. and again, coming back to like my relationship with the reader, i felt like the essays weren't working as art because i was pushed so hard on the reader. i had so much urgency for them to come to my of view. and so that had this kind of utilitarian to it that i wanted the reader to agree me. it was almost like i needed to write an ed right, which would

then that utility. but wasn't what i wanted to do. i wanted more spaciousness for the reader to be able to experience it emotionally and just be inside the experience with all the kind of charged irreducible ity of it. and so that's how i realized it needed to be, not but a novel, no matter how much it might course bond to my own life, that had to be incidental and it was going to be a novel. and so on i was thinking on that yesterday, i realized that me what literature is art comes down to is for me that the writing is like defying. that. it's not like a newspaper report or a history book or a business proposal which could be very artfully done. but there's something it's like beyond and those things, it's it's it's its own thing. it's its own relationship with the reader unto itself, which inherently was making me think about how much i these two writers and everyone who does

what we try to do. because if the work, if the writing isn't utilitarian and it doesn't have a clear reason that the reader would have that should be published or it should be read right, if it's not giving like the essential news of the day or, it's not like, you know, a proposal for business that needs to be read to get your your business funding or your grant funding. and there's no utilitarianism there right? then it's just for its own self, own inherent integrity, its own experience set it has to offer. and then for you, the writer, that just means you're going to have to step up with a lot of faith because it doesn't have that built reason for being published and read. but i haven't regretted trying to go that way. yeah, no, i love that. interesting. i mean, several of the things that you said are really interesting and i'm drawn to the thing you said about, the relationship with yourself and with the reader, because i think the question in well, and in fiction too, you know, but but often times in teaching memoir,

you know, we talk a lot about narrative distance. so sort of where is the narrator vis a vis the character because narrator is both both the narrator and the character who lived the events. and so that's that's really interesting to. me and also the thing about literature i think, you know, i think of something cheryl strayed, the author of wild, said and she said, oh, she wrote, there is what happens your memoir. and then is what your memoir is about. and i think literature has to do with there being a a great deal of about to a work in other words it's more than just utilitarian there's someone said oh it's got theme a simple way of saying someone once said that history is the king died, queen died and literature is the king died. the queen died of grief. so that so i'm wondering, we were talking before this about well to to former professors of

mine and great memoirs, fiction writers, tobias and frank conroy. and i'm thinking about about this boy's life, you know, and time, which are great books of the form, but know even with fiction, when i think of a retrospective narrator, i think those are characters. there's the one who's who's writing it, or voice, and then there's the character who's observed. and i'm wondering if part of the task. rachel, you talked about kind of an agenda, and that smacks of a kind of self-consciousness and but but is it like you think of tobias wolff writing about, you know, he, he was called jack back in the day, a young toby and he's in concrete washington having there's a great story where his mother is going on a series of dates with abusive men. and this one man comes over early before the and says, you know how i'll i'll be around and we're going go to take great trips and you're going to get a ross bicycle, you know, and he's trying to charm him. and then they had this horrible day in mothers. i don't know what has happened to her, but she's a wreck and

miserable and crying and she's in two. she checks in on her son and he listens. the whole thing is completely and the last thing he says, your mom. did you say anything about the ross bicycle, sir? but that ability of the writer to see that kid as as someone outside of himself, in a way mean i guess it is you and it isn't you. and i'm wondering if you can talk about the benefits of arriving at that kind distance. i mean, especially with a story like yours, you know, i mean, well, both of you, but but with such a harrowing story there, how were you able to that little bit of distance. yeah, i think i was able to create a lot of distance and i like to think of that of nonfiction as therapy. plus, there's also part of denigrating it is not art is sometimes i'll be like, oh well, it's just it was a therapeutic memoir. but, you know, if you can write a work of of writing that has its own intrigues and becomes its own world to the plus it was therapeutic to you that just a

win win. and so what happened was yeah getting lot of distance actually that that book was really hard i had to do things like go get the coroner's report for my body after he was murdered and read about how the knife was stuck in his neck and things like that, that i had never really faced before. and it took me to then to make the final narrative turn of that book, i had to ask myself, okay, what do i as the character now i put myself on the pages, the character i've lived all these up to this point. what do i to do for this character to actually resolution in her life in rachel, can i interrupt for one second? you also have to chart what your character knows back then and know, right? and that's part of it. right i mean, which is difficult because you know, now all these things that have happened in the intervening years. yeah. and but just to talk about you were saying about getting distance in nonfiction. well so interesting because i mean so jason's writing a book

that doesn't involve him, so then he has to just take these these people who existed on paper as facts and all his research and then somehow he has to do the same thing, has to imaginatively project them as characters. so it's still a of imagination that's at the center of making literature. that's art. and i find that the chemistry is different with every project for that. i want to hear about that from lindsay too because like i now i just completed a manuscript where for a long time i couldn't get that distance from myself and so it wasn't working. and i ended up writing almost the whole manuscript in third person about myself in order to then take it and, recast it back into first person with how i was able to see my own flaws and my own character arc that i couldn't have if i didn't write it in third person first. if that ever happened to you. well, i've never done that exact thing. i've struggled with that and actually in my memoir, i had to play a lot with narrative distance because i had to write

a lot about events where i had been proactive in that i was not particularly proud of or pleased with. as i was writing it. so i had to have compassion in for my character and not, you know, say i was a total screw up and do these horrible things, but, you know, inhabit the in a way that the reader would understand what motivated this character to, do things. i couldn't be judgmental of of my character. so did a lot of, you know what i guess we might call musing or a lot of you know you know, just to use sort of dummy copy things like, you know, back then i didn't realize blah blah, i was too in with so-and-so to his dark side. i mean, that's bad dummy copy. but that kind of thing, you know, back then i didn't. now what? i know what, i know now as i'm writing this, you know, not said

that baldly, but so i think that was a big issue in my memoir. not all of my memoir was stuff i wasn't proud of, but there were sections primarily about a relationship that that went badly that i had to portray, where i had to show, again, the motivation, the character, but show what had you know, you talk about the narrative, what i had learned from and more recent pieces of, narrative memoir have been more, more immediate, more, sort of almost actually, there's a piece i have i brought with me just sort of a set my little security blanket, a piece of memoir written in present tense. so there isn't that narrative distance is being with the character as she's living these things. but there still has to be that that resolution that rachel talked about or that kind of, for lack of a better term, epiphany, awareness, change that happens in the piece. i don't know if that answered your question. yeah, yeah, it does.

and you talked about what jason does in terms of sort of breathing light. so i invited. jason roberts to come to one of my classes at stanford years ago and when he was working on his first book which was about a man who circumnavigated the globe twice and he was completely blind right. his own and but he had all historical fact. and i was kind of dreading when it came in. he was going to read part of it. but i thought it was going to be really dry. that was my sense of just it just i didn't know what it was to be. and then he read it and it was so vivid and so full of life. and it's a little bit of a magic trick. but and i think of that sort of what the nonfiction about that magic trick aspect and i think the two books that sort of change the world in some ways, you know, for literary nonfiction were in cold blood and executioner's song. and then if you've in cold blood, it's like one of the great novels and it's just stunning and and it has to be written by a novelist mean that's like to a certain extent, these terrific fiction writers they bring to bear on

nonfiction. i mean, we reap the benefits. capote is constant curiosity, a character who moved me the most in the book was bonnie clutter, who was the depressed mother. and there's a description of a room, and there's just so much empathy in that i mean also gets the murderer's, you know, and there's so much, you know, that he breathes into that that seems impossible you know, for a nonfiction book. but anyway those those you if you haven't read those and i met at a party when i was in grad school and asked about executioner's song and, he said that he thinks it came from god he said he just i mean he knew a ton he'd done so much research but that at that point the book just itself and to a certain extent i think maybe that's part it. i mean, we were talking before and i think that when you're trained as a novelist, it's so hard to do that thing, you know to write a novel, but then you carry that novelist sensibility into your observations in the way you you sort things into their place. and for me, you know, i was just

finishing my first novel in 911 happened, and my high school classmate, a chairman of cantor fitzgerald and my friends died and i got thrown the middle of that story and. it was sad beyond belief, you know, but i felt like i landed on a page 170 of a novel because everything was going and and so it started to i you know, i was given the task of writing that story and wrote it like a novel, you know, with all based on observations and stuff and structured it that way. but i don't i guess i guess my question then is, is what in your education as a fiction writer or the things you've learned from both of your avid readers have literature, what does that help in terms of carrying itself into, how you see the world when you're when you're trying to describe it in nonfiction. so you start, well, think a lot of it has to do with scene building scene and having that skill, having that muscle.

as a fiction writer of writing a and being able to write scene, which raises the question we about a little bit earlier like, okay this is not verbatim what so-and-so write. you know, you're not going to remember what your mother actually literally said to over the dinner table when you were five years old. but, you know your mother really well, and, you know, the kind of things she would have said so you can be true to who she was and true to who you are and recreate recreating scene. but i think also detail and i think the ability to pick up the details and i'm sure i mean i don't know i was in but you know part of what made jason's that alive in that stanford class was was the detail we use and certainly with with cold blood and with execution or song with i just i read a couple of years ago an amazing work of narrative nonfiction called say nothing by patrick radden about the troubles in northern ireland and about a woman who vanishes one night and her murder.

but the details that he's able to pick up through research and not the kind of details where you're just submerged in like, oh, my god, so many details, you just begin to mean. but the telling detail, detail, you know, so so culling those details and picking the ones that really resonant. so i think those are two, you know, certainly not the only but two skills of novel writing that help nonfiction that's really and i wonder you know about that time i haven't done it. i haven't written memoir of writing dialog from scenes that happen that long. and were you ever worried as you were doing it or you just had that faith, as you said, that i know my mom? i know i know the kinds of conversations. i'm fine with this. so, yeah, always had that faith. i mean, perhaps. but yeah, i felt like wasn't i was either remembering that i was sure enough that, okay, maybe i didn't it word for word verbatim, but i i remembered enough of what she said. i as i said earlier, i knew her well that, that that i could, i

trusted myself in that it's when you're going back and you know, it's somebody you you don't. but then maybe you have to ask yourself. i mean, not everything has to be seen, right? not everything that has to have dialog. so. i ended up having a sort a like ethically lucky way out of that in that are unlucky, i don't know. but so different people had different memories of my father and, his third wife running up to his murder. my whole family thought that my father's third wife had something do with killing him and so as i started getting into the story, i comparing other people's memories and seeing how they added up or didn't. and it was actually very to a memoirist because i was able to build into the storytelling that different people remembered it differently. and this was how i remembered it as true as i could. and built the kind of searching

for where was the truth among our various accounts into the story? and for me, that was a really something, especially the journal that made me feel more ethically, even though i love people like joanne beard and who takes full liberty with details. and i think there is like an implicit license dialog and a lot of details into, okay, you're recreating scene. the reader knows that this is not documentary and already built into the relationship so i you know i don't have an ethical problem with that but i did have for me as a journalist a nice way to also acknowledge it being built on memory because i think that acknowledgment is important and there are a you had your way of doing it because you have these different versions of the story, but also just acknowledging you in plain in words. i don't remember exactly what she said night, but it was

something like x, you know, when i was writing my book, is it this i want to talk about this for a little bit because it's so interesting. me and i told these guys earlier that frank conroy said, his rule of it is and stop time think i have this right there's a scene the kids outside the house in squirrel jumps and it lands on a fence. it startles him, but it felt like it landed his shoulder. so he wrote that the squirrel landed his shoulder. and that's the kind of thing he thinks is okay. so and we can talk about why that, but i wrote this book. and i remember i was talking to people that were involved in the book and one of the people that i won't name was like, wouldn't it be great if she said rather than, you know, but she didn't, you know, and i had this whole quandary. even my editors were encouraging me to change things, and i still had that's kind of journalistic ethic that you do that, although i do, you know i think there is a certain sense that license has been taken long ago memory that that i'm for maybe is the adage or it's just about good faith in

some ways. but i don't know if either one of you want to talk about it. you guys know, i don't know. some of you are or younger and you don't know, the whole james frey controversy, you know, huge things are made. he said that he was in prison for like four months and he was there for 2 hours, you know, or something. so and and it was there were a lot of debates, but it was an entertaining book. you know, is that okay? and i think most of us thought it wasn't. but where's the line? guess yeah. yeah. we were talking about it. so individual i would not say the squirrel landed on my shoulder if going to use that as a litmus test. but i respect people who would say it. but for me often i'm making the choice to write non in addition to the relationship with the reader. it also has something to do with wanting to pay tribute to what was true and real so and conversely, when i wrote my

novel that has a lot a lot a lot in common with my own life and that narrator basically you could have said was me, it sounds an awful lot like me as awful lot of my life details, but wasn't me and oh, it was so amazing to be able to change things and not worry about it. i was like, oh, well, this simpler, i'll just make it this disease. i'll just, yeah, but yeah, i wouldn't, i wouldn't put the, i wouldn't say the squirrels on my shoulder but, you know, i think i'd be more interested the reaction that the narrator to the jump and that's what seems important. so i don't know that he minced with you. i don't know that he needs to land on the shoulder, but i think. yeah, i mean, the james frey thing is such a textbook story. it does seem particularly egregious to turn, you know, 2 hours into four months or whatever. but i think yeah, i mean, i don't know if this doesn't sound you know, but i think we look

memory is fallible by definition, right? memory is subjective. not may say i remember exactly what my mother said to me that day when i was eight, but come on, do i? you know, so there is there has to be some of some leap of faith, if you will. and also like about the jason where he's doing something, where know it needs to be historically or people who know are going to come after him and point out all the flaws. so he has to take on that extra of responsibility and still give it all this narrative drive, all this character, you know, roundness as the writing cliche goes. yeah, i read a review, an interview recently with radden keefe, who wrote say nothing, and he talked about that all the dialog in, his novel was based on interviews. so, you know, the interviewee may have remembered something incorrectly, but he, the writer got, you know, he could cite every piece of dialog, but

that's that's a piece of journal. it's narrative nonfiction. i would say it's literature, but it's it's not it's not memoir. it's not pretending to be memoir. you guys are mentioned a little bit, but wondering if you each maybe pick one or two works of nonfiction that really blew you away in a literary sense. you know, that really sort of captured i mean, i mentioned in cold blood but like what are a couple things that that aspiring should absolutely read if they want to see the best of the four well i'm right now teaching in the master final program at saint mary's college, california a shout out and in nonfiction and we just read hanif abdurraqib is a little devil in america, which entwines lyric essay memoir, lot of cultural criticism and all from fact. and it's amazing and other things that have recently blown away are theresa murray and my

arts heart berries. if anyone here knows that memoir, it's it's so crystallized also personally when i think about art. something that's on my wish list for it is for i really love integer t of form and that's what teresa my aunt's has and then i'm i'm dreading that i'm going to mispronounce name but kiesel lemons i think is an amazing from the last few years with this incredible second person talking to his mother her way of getting that distance and, getting the right relationship between him and the material and the reader and the material spent. i was plink out asked this, but i think one of the best memoirs i read recently, his recent recently and it wasn't that recently was jesmyn ward men. we reaped that was fabulous and. you know, we mentioned earlier literature. what makes literature? and one thing we didn't really talk about that just alluded to, and i want to just touch on and

amplify a little form and what we can do as writers of nonfiction and i mean, obviously we do this we can do this with fiction too, but i think the question at least i'm writing nonfiction, the sort of pressing craft is often one of structure. how do i structure? and i think the ways we can do that in in interesting ways, the braided essay or the way you can bring in disparate strata ends and sort of weave them and juxtapose things up against each other is that that i recently a short sort of a novella length piece of memoir by nelson and i'm embarrassed i'm blanking on the name of the piece but he brought in both grief over friend's death a close friends death discussion the short story grief by chekhov if and his in his graduate school who had

introduced him to that and his own like walking his neighborhood with his baby daughter. and so the sort of present that and those three things weaving together i think was really masterfully done. i also think there's a writer for the new yorker, and she basically writes criticism, but she wrote a piece of maybe six years ago that six months ago excuse me, that stuck with me. her name is catherine schultz, and she wrote a piece about suspense. so it was a critical piece, was a critic's literary critic piece about, you know, suspense and literature. but she talked about the suspense of her baby waiting for the new to be born. and i thought that that really made an impact on me. and i thought was really beautifully done. and casey cep is another writer who writes for the new yorker as well as other and she writes, i think, really well, religion and spirituality and figures who been important in in religion and. i think religion can be one of the trickiest things write

about. i wrote about prayer in my memoir. and it's very you. you don't want to be preachy. you don't want to be dogmatic and you and you're writing about something that ultimately is rather abstract, right? so how you do that and she does that, i think nicely. it's great. i the new yorker is a great, you know, not saying anything original there, but it is a great place for the form of nonfiction i've taught for years. i thought the profile the new yorker book of profiles is great in of form. there's a piece by janet malcolm, the late janet malcolm. it's called 41 false starts. and so she starts a profile about artist david saul 41 times. so she starts in scene in his art studio. she starts with with something he did as a kid she starts with a story about him. she goes at it from 41 different directions. and that's profile at the end, it's over. and when you read it, it's impossible not to want to do exactly that, you know, with a piece. and there's so many remarkable

know because they just take it over the years. and there's a great profile of anatole broyard, who was the critic for the times and he pretty much was was a black man who passed as white and his kids didn't even know that he was black for years. and it begins with someone who's staying in a house that he owned. and they look at a magazine and they've cut out part of his bio. and that's the part of bio that says that that he was black. and so then they begin and they build the story. but the other, too, is that it's filled with contradictions and half the time you love him. half the time you're really troubled him. and maybe that's part of the quality of what makes it literature. is it than a polemic? is is that it's complicated, you know, and it's that that that that ability to capture someone who's three dimensional that we feel though we've spent time with them though they have a great lillian hellman has a profile hemingway and it's just he just like 3 hours with him and you just feel like you know him. so well by the end of it, just by these weird, she tells.

but it's it's just that she brings this incredible level of observation to it and then. so, i mean, it's it's hard to quantify is literary, but that's literary. it's also kind of funny to but yeah, i guess so. i guess i guess i agreeing with you, that form is a big part of it. so what are you working on now know? are you working on fiction and nonfiction? do you want to talk a little bit about it or. i am going to take fifth. i i'm so actually this is relevant. so i finished a manuscript that i wrote so i wrote my novel in like seven months, which was amazing because previous to that i tried to write a novel, i worked on the same manuscript eight years and that novel was never going to be published. then the next one, it came in seven months and didn't. anyway, i after that, i started

writing a manuscript last year that i wrote in like four months, and i shared it with very many people. i don't think it can be shared for a few years, but i did send it out, win a grant for it. and so that hugely encouraging and interesting is that it, it i sent it is nonfiction so it the grant in nonfiction but i still feel unsettled as to whether it's fiction or nonfiction and i may not know actually myself which it is for a few more years and i and i'm also finishing a memoir. so having written a memoir, my father being murdered, i'm now writing a riddick uselessly lightweight memoir about learning to sing at a 91 year old piano bar in and how it changed my life and all the people there. and i just finish that. i think it's so interesting to not know whether something's to be nonfiction or fiction and. i mean, i'm pretty sure that dave eggers did not know whether what is the what was going to be

a novel or was going to be nonfiction. i know for a time in that process. so i don't think, know you're alone in that process, but that interests me lot. you're going, well, i was just thinking they have a piece of something that i wrote as a personal essay. completely, completely true episode that happened. and i decided to send it out somewhere as a short, short because it was the right length for short fiction. and i felt like it worked as a story. and so i've i've kind of played both sides of the coin with that can either you talk about, you know, i mean, there's also the lure or there was for a while of that nonfiction sells easier than fiction. fiction is really difficult to publish and that there's more of a market in many ways for nonfiction. in fact, there are a lot writers have been canceled by their agents. you know, if you just made it nonfiction, well, it didn't happen, but just call it nonfiction. but i don't know if you felt any that sense or if you can talk a little bit, because a lot of people here may have manuscript.

but what what the marketplace is these days for nonfiction i'll speak to that. i definitely was very lucky. i mean, i it was a fluke when my first book got picked up by publishers i knew it would never happen again. and it was happening in large part because it was such a moment for memoir. it was just a heartbreaking work of staggering genius had come out a few years before, and the lions club was big. there were these memoirs coming out. there was that big memoir, and my father had been murdered. so it was definitely, you know, part of that. and and now things are different. now there's a lot of talk about, oh, memoirs are harder category because it doesn't have genre is the way fiction has genres that make it easier to shelve and sell. and so these things are they're going to ebb and more as the decade's come on. so my feeling about it is that you have to write the work that creates the relationship want to have with the material and with the reader.

but it definitely has shifted a lot. i would just underscore that yeah, well it we open it up for some questions from the audience, but we're about 15 minutes, so just raise your hand, bring the thank you for this. where or how or does autofiction fit this conversation? i would say that my novel was influenced by autofiction, although i don't know who's doing the defining. some people that i would read as autofiction who haven't made, or maybe labeled their own things as autofiction but ginni awful and anti or no. and you so and then i is the novel that i wrote autofiction i mean rachel cask i love autofiction is definitely hugely influenced by it and. i autofiction is fiction that

seems like it's coming from the narrator slash author's life and the boundary i would say is being deliberately there's a deliberate blurring where the reader is kind of invited to think this could be this person's life, but there's no claim being made of fealty to the facts and the actual experience. the rachel clause says that anything that's not actual fact is ridiculous and to make anything up. she doesn't believe in, but. right. and so that's right. yeah and so my own i don't know if, i would call it out of fiction or not, even though i love a of things that are labeled autofiction. well, another person we didn't talk about is karl rove knausgaard you know, and how have read any of the most troubled books. yeah. and those i mean, it's such a strange phenomenon. i remember that he just burst the scene and suddenly you look at all these books which are straight of his life and it goes on and on and on. and i loved them, you know, just gobbled them up. and it was just sort of sharing his brain a while, you know? and even i was always an it was

a you know, the early of my son's life, he's suddenly going a dad to some horrible jim berry style thing. you know in sweden. and doing these incredibly lacerating fascinating portraits of everybody there. and i couldn't stop reading it and then there's there's a party that he goes to it's just i mean who would want to hang out with this guy right because you're going to be in the book but it's a bunch of people at a dinner party and they're all telling stories there's some kind of rubric to it. but you have the feeling after about pages that that all those marriages going to end like that night, you know. but it's yeah, but that's suddenly that like who wouldn't want to do but well just to the question where does autofiction fit into this. i think it fits in as just another option among a all of these different options. let's agree with it. yeah, but that idea of like, like how are you? you have a story to tell and you sort of what we began with what are you going to one other thought i have on that though

having written what i think could be categorized it that was interesting to me to discover was that when i was writing the novel even though almost all of it corresponded to me in my life, but some of it didn't but even i could tell it a different orientation to the material for it really was like everything in it was fiction and it corresponds to me and my life was completely coincide all and that's how it had to be. it all had to be like completely coincidental that it corresponded for it to work as a novel. because i, i feel that novels have to have own independent reality. i like that yeah, i feel like with my fiction, if it if it if there's autobiography it's inadvertent you know in the end and i like that answer so i'm wondering if you find it easier to write nonfiction or fiction. why or if it depends on what you're writing about, i'll answer that.

i generally find it easier to write nonfiction, because with fiction, there's this pressure that you can make anything up. you can change anything at any time, can change the pov well, you know, you can, you can off a character, you can merge six characters into two characters. you know, you can do all kinds of things. and and i mean, you know, both of them have their challenges. don't get me wrong, i'm saying nonfiction is is necessarily easier to. but i think with fiction, things that have made it so for me in completing my novel, which i've been working on for, i won't even tell you how many years. it's finished now. those kinds of i think you those kinds of question really made me of doubt in a way that nonfiction it was like with nonfiction, i had the security. okay, i know, i know my

situation i might not yet quite know my story and the story and the situation are different. right. as vivian gornick told us, you know, i didn't maybe have my narrative arc totally down yet, but i knew what my i had all the pieces to my puzzle. i just had arrange them with fiction. it's like seven different jigsaw puzzles on the same table and then another eighth one comes in and then half of them the cat spills off and you're beginning again. and it's just a lot for a lot more doubt. doubt you know, i was going to bring up norman again. this is from an interview, but someone asked that question and he said that that if you review that with a fiction, if he makes a wrong turn with nonfiction, he said that cost me three weeks. he if i make the wrong turn with fiction, that might cost me six months. yeah. yeah. and that's that's a good way to, you know, to think about it. it is. and for all the reason, if you're lucky just six months. yeah.

thank you for. i'm sorry. on the topic of autofiction i think there's a lot of new exciting women writers and young writers. i'm thinking. edward louise. i mean, you have edward louis is history of violence and he never claims that to be a memoir or but yeah not as much of a question but as what you think that kind of new emerging genre of. and then isn't there something kind of not true to nonfiction about imposing a literary structure onto true events the first place that you're skipping out on something or? i'm just kind of interested in that question question. it depends on what you call true know. i mean, i think because i think that i think one of the things that made me want to be a writer and probably i'm not going to speak for these these two folks, but is that it is kind of my

church or temple. it's my religion because it is where i find truth and i find it sort of it's a form that won't yield falseness or it will expose it really quickly. and so it begins to be the lens with which you see world. you know, in a way it does seem truer than because why are you choosing this thing or that thing? and part of it is, is you know, you try to gather as much from as many different directions and then see what rises. john gardner in the art of fiction has his line. he said that you want to reread your work late in the process 100 times so that you can only meaning to the surface, which part of it is. and also there's this adage that you that you don't want to overdetermined it. you don't want to decide before you set out what. it's going to mean and then make it then follow through with it. so so a lot of it is is it all out there and sitting back as if it was created by someone else and figuring out what means? and so i it's closer to truth, you know, rather what i throw together, you know, straight off, you know, out of my brain. i think that's such an important

point about about sitting with an intention. i know what i want, know what this story is going to be about. i know what this novel going to be about. i know what this memoir is going to be about. and then you start writing it and it it it it won't necessarily. and it's you get frustrated. you think. but wait, it's not doing what i wanted to do. let it go where it needs to go. you know? i mean, that sounds a little woo woo. but, but i think, i think the discovery of it's about is part of the writing process. i think if we start out with outline and follow that outline to the t we don't have as much literature as we just have, i don't know, polemic or something. as. as far as publishing memoir and, the degree of how comfortable you have to get with being vulnerable with your personal story. can you talk about that process?

yeah, you do very well comfortable. yeah. which actually for me a strength because for whatever i just don't have nearly as don't i just i tell people way too much and i hide nothing and it's not always one of my best qualities. and then that has ramifications for how need to treat the manuscript later. when i look back on it and see maybe what i revealed about other people because i'm so free with revealing things about myself that i don't pause. oh, i reveal that about that person because i just, you know, figure people are like me. but yeah, you had to real comfortable with it. and especially as lynsey was talking about earlier, like when you're, you know, to have your character arc, you know, sometimes you had to start, you had to show your characters dark places and less attributes, but you had to do it in a way where you can create enough space around that. so that, that you're not judging. and the readers not judging. and yeah to be real vulnerable.

do you want to talk about that? well, yeah, i was just going to disagree and say that i you know, for me personally, writing nonfiction and someone we talked about this a little bit earlier, know the voice that comes to is often a much more confessional revealing voice. and i've had editors say to me, you know, you're your nonfiction is so, you know, the characters are so open and we really see their vulnerabilities and we really see see them know in a way that we don't in your fiction. so i think in my fiction, i'm more protective of my characters. interestingly enough, because, you know, a memoir writing about myself, but i've always, ever since i was a kid, been really drawn to i remember mademoiselle magazine and used to have all these personal essays back in the glory days of women's magazines and and i just have always been drawn to that voice. mary cantwell i remember reading and loving, and just where you

stuff about yourself and your you're doing on the page. so it always safe to me the scary part is then when you decide to go, you know maybe send it out or read it or something. so that's kind of a rambling addition to the answer. but. you are talking about james frey, and there is the power memoir. like had he written it and claimed it was fiction, would even have sold that much. so where is the power of memoir versus i do not think it would have sold as well. yes, that's i don't i don't think it was it was more of a shocking book than an extremely well-written book. i mean, isn't that part of what's known about the whole story, that he did write it as fiction and shop it that way and it was true. that's right. i think they encouraged him to, too. yeah. so i'm wondering, you know, just with the previous question whether if you're look, one of the things that a novelist told

me was he like, humiliate his characters in the beginning of his novels. i mean, they ended it much better place a pretty well known novelist and but he said that that you end up loving them in that state and i'm wondering if there's a tendency in nonfiction and towards self-deprecation win over an audience or whether you're even aware of that. like if you're well, you know, it'll i guess owning certain signaling to the reader early on that you're going you're going to protect your character and whether that into the writing process. well i think it definite affects the reader. i know as a reader if a if a character is, if a narrator is vulnerable, i'm you know in a way that feels genuine, in a way that feel, you know, up i'm i'm hooked in. so i don't think i as a writer, i don't think i can't sleep conscious. excuse me. having trouble with that word? you know what? i mean, i don't think i consciously do it, but i think i

think that yeah, that that is there part to show yourself, to show yourself as maybe, you know, vulnerable flaw and, you know, i think nothing's more off putting a narrator who puts himself forward as you know, you know, totally got it together 100% great. you know, i mean, throw the book across the room right. i mean, we all have flaws. we all have imperfections. and, you know, we don't want to dwell on them, don't want to write about them, you know, full of self-pity. but i think the more honestly, sort of unflinchingly, we can show some of those moments. you know, we we when our readers over to us. but i don't think it's done. i think it's i don't think that in a calculated way at least not consciously calculated. yeah, i agree with that. and i it's just reminding me too, that this you know why i still love books even as we move into our iphones and all this other media. but i think part the reason i

love to write and needed to write was that i still find that books and the page are an intimate space where, okay, you're publishing it, you don't who is going to pick it up. but while it's being read, the relationship is between you as the author and and one reader. and you can be so intimate in that which me was really important because my father having been murdered when, i was so young. i felt really i felt so much shame. i hated to go on dates or to parties where people might ask him. i did not want to have a conversation never have a conversation at. a cocktail party about what my being murder had done to my life. but i could have that conversation. and by writing four in a book and just this beautiful, intimate thing that we still have. so let's keep it. that's great. you know, i was thinking about just in terms of our to one's self as one is writing. michael chabon a really good

book on a bunch of essays about fatherhood. and in of the essays. and part of it is him who sneaks in so. there's a great essay a lot of you've probably read he takes his son is fascinated with high fashion so he took his son to milan for fashion week right and they ended up getting because he's michael chabon you know, they got to go to all amazing events with all these great designers. and it's such a great week. and it's the whole piece sounds. you're reading it thinking, what a great father, what a great you know, this is such a great thing. and then at end, he describes talking his son about fashion week and what was favorite part. and then he talks it. he ranks it in his favorite things. like there's two things. they're both moments where his dad was not around. he at the end of it, but it's like power of that, you know, that kind of real it's not that that you think radically differently of what he was before, but there's a number of pieces in there where they arrive, these really surprising moments. a you know, you'll have to read it. but i just i felt like this is

so much a part of what it is because you feel the whatever it is you feel the piece wanting to be one thing, but it can't if another truth gets revealed at the end. and there's such power in that. i think so do we any more questions we have time for one final question. if anybody has a question. know, we have two questions. yes. hi. a lot of contemporary memoirs crossed genres and, used different styles and scores of writing, mixing prose and poetry and magical realism, dream work, all that stuff. i was wondering, you guys thought about that that, those. i mean, i can't think of. one, do you have a particular title in mind i can't think of like, well, say i haven't can't think of one i've offered up in my head that fits the description. you're saying in my mind, sorry.

in the dream house there car a oh okay. oh, right. of course. yeah. i think it's great i mean, i think if it serves, if it's, you know, if it serves the story, if it's done and works artfully, i, it can work really well. i think, you know the danger in it maybe is that did things become a little you know, where are sort of where where is our solid ground here? you know, we're moving around so much and i'm always a little hesitant about too much writing about dreams, whether it's you know dreams in fiction, i'm always a little wary. but think, you know, if the writer can make work beautifully and serve the story, you know, i think the more the form is is played and people take risks and try things, i think i think that's, you know, that's for the good you might want to read. i mean, it's not a it's an older book, but it's such a great way to use the form is michael ondaatje she's running with the

family. so it's a it's a beautiful book and and the all the different some of it is just straight ahead prose. some of it is poetry. i mean, it's it's musical it's beautiful and surprising it has such a great energy and it's thin. you but it's just it does so much in a short space. but yeah, yeah. it's reminded me, too, of bruno schulz's work, you know, if you like a kind early autofiction writing about himself. what was this? and this is like he was by an ss officer in the build to the world war two. right? so that would place him historically. but yeah, it's his life. it's his town. then all of these fantastical things happening and he's, you know, turning into bugs. before kafka did. yeah, i love, it, yeah. so. oh, no. was just saying i mean one thing at something to think about for all aspiring writers is at least what believe i think the characters in the stories create the form like so like rather than thinking about some of experimentation, i want to try

out. it's often the material that leads you to that. and i think what one of the themes today is, is an elastic form. nonfiction is elastic. it borrows from literature and and, and you should take some chances if the material calls for it. so but thank you so much to quick and we've doing this so. thank you so much for coming today we are all so excited to see you and so excited to have this conversation. and today my name is leslie absher and i'm the author of spy daughter queer girl in search of truth and acceptance in a family of secrets out by later books. and today, i have the pleasure with amazing co pane