Genealogy Books - The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

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Summary: sylvia winner
Comment: Vivian Gornick never disappoints me. Her intellegence and insights abound and this is a particularly
stimulating and revealing book.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Incredible
Comment: Gornick's approach to the subject and her analysis of personal narrative = priceless. A thoroughly
engaging read for those who are exploring how to become stronger writers of essays and/or memoirs.
Highly recommended.

Customer Rating:

Summary: A book that deserves the stature of its author
Comment: Vivian Gornick writes beautifully, whether she's writing about love, politics, or the craft of
writing. The Situation and the Story is based on her many years of teaching creative writing and
focuses on ways of making nonfiction personal without wallowing in self-absorption. In other words,
it helps writers discover where the 'universal truth,' the essence of Story, is in the millions of
anecdotes in our lives.
As an author and writing teacher, I've found this book invaluable and
have read it several times. My copy is well thumbed and appropriately coffee-stained.

Customer Rating:

Summary: Thoughtful discussion, beautifully written
Comment: Vivian Gornick invariably delights me, whether in her memoir, Fierce Attachments, her occasional
essays in various journals, her book about reading, or this new one, which gave me a lot to think
about.
The Situation and the Story focuses on essay and memoir-writing. Rather than trying to
cover a lot of ground superficially, Gornick lays out one main idea and explores it in depth, using
a wide variety of examples to illustrate her ideas. It was particularly helpful to have long
excerpts from these examples, so I could really get a sense of the essay or memoir being discussed.
She deals most intelligently with the question of the narrator -- the narrator's "persona" on the
page, and the relationship of the narrator to her/his material.
As someone who writes and teaches
memoir, I found this extremely helpful, but it will be equally interesting to anyone who writes or
reads narrative nonfiction and wants to think seriously about it.
It is a great relief to find a
book about writing that has gracefully sidestepped every pitfall of the advice genre. Gornick's
style is respectful: she expects her readers to be as serious and smart about literature as she is
herself and, even if we're not, we can always find a lot to think about in her work.

Customer Rating:

Summary: The Situation and The Story
Comment: The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick is immensely entertaining while adapting an
educational prose designed to enhance awareness of "self" as narrator. She uses excellent examples
of non-fiction narratives that serve to further the invitation of speculation through tone, syntax,
and perspective. The self as a persona is developed using wonderful writers such as Joan Didion,
Oscar Wilde, and Edmond Gosse.

Vivian Gornick breaks down the writing barrier and gets right to
the contents of human emotion. We are what we write, and our personal truths are conveyed in our
words. She does a fabulous job taking a stand against the "boring, agitated" self and replaces
that with the truth speaker who can move an essay forward creatively and effectively. Non-fiction
can instruct without losing the personal voice.

For anyone who likes to write, this book is the
first step to question your narrative self and begin to discover the wonderful implications that
"self" can bring to your writing. I highly recommend this book.

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