{"id":6203,"date":"2014-12-24T09:30:28","date_gmt":"2014-12-24T16:30:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=6203"},"modified":"2014-12-28T10:50:34","modified_gmt":"2014-12-28T17:50:34","slug":"memoir-novels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2014\/12\/24\/memoir-novels\/","title":{"rendered":"Memoir-Novels"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

What Accounts for Our Current \u2014 or Recurrent \u2014 Fascination With Memoir-Novels?<\/h1>\n

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Leslie Jamison and Daniel Mendelsohn discuss our interest in narratives that blur the line between the real and the fabricated.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"LeslieBy Leslie Jamison<\/p>\n

Why do we like that space of uncertainty in which we don\u2019t know what\u2019s been invented and what hasn\u2019t?<\/em><\/p>\n

In May of 1856, a traveling panorama called \u201cArctic Regions!\u201d arrived in Philadelphia, offering \u201ca complete voyage from New York to the North Pole.\u201d Posters bragged that it was \u201cfresh from the hands\u201d of a \u201cgreat Master of American Artists\u201d and could \u201ctransport us to the icy North,\u201d promising a kind of paradox: that you could become aware of its artistic mastery by forgetting it was art at all.<\/p>\n

This brings to mind a certain tension in how we read, as well, a dynamic David Shields has described in his relationship to autobiographical writing: \u201cat once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice.\u201d There\u2019s an electric charge in toggling back and forth between the shimmer of what\u2019s been artfully constructed and the glint of what actually was. The reader is impressed by the panoramic architecture even as she forgets its presence.<\/p>\n

This ambiguous territory has a more established place in poetry, a genre never filed into separate \u201cfiction\u201d and \u201cnonfiction\u201d areas on the shelves. But for narrative we\u2019ve long been obsessed with partitioning the actual from the imagined, and the memoir-novel offers, finally, some relief from that Sisyphean taxonomy project. Shields describes the pleasure of \u201cblurring (to the point of invisibility) . . . any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the lure of the blur? Why do we like that space of uncertainty in which we don\u2019t know what\u2019s been invented and what hasn\u2019t?<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times What Accounts for Our Current \u2014 or Recurrent \u2014 Fascination With Memoir-Novels? Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Leslie Jamison and Daniel Mendelsohn discuss our interest in narratives that blur the line between the real and the fabricated. By Leslie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6203\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}