On my desk there’s a trinket box I received as a gift one Christmas. It’s a marvel of sculpture, found objects and profound wisdom. On the top is a pile of pens and pencils, painted silver; on the front this quote from Hemingway:
That sums up the writer’s soul more succinctly—as you might expect from Hemingway—than anything I’ve ever read. Because for a writer, no experience is completely real until it’s been written. Maybe for a photographer, expressing thoughts and feelings comes through capturing images. For a musician or composer, the expression comes through notes. But for a writer, it’s all about words on paper.
What to do, then, when it’s an experience that strikes at your very core, an experience so painful or so life-defining that it shakes one’s belief in the meaning of just about everything. Two marvelous writers demonstrate the polar extremes, if you will, when it comes to writing about these types of experiences: Norman Maclean and Joan Didion. Both suffered profound tragedies that wounded them deeply. Both transcended these events and even used them to create magnificent literature.
For Maclean, it took forty or more years to gain what . . . the distance, the emotional strength? . . . to examine and finally transmute his personal pain into literature so compelling it remains with the reader long after the last word is done. In 1976, he published A River Runs through It and Other Stories, based on events that happened in his life more 40 years earlier. In 1992, two years after he died, Young Men and Fire was published and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Like the events of his childhood, the Mann Gulch fire in 1949 had occupied his mind—and creative talents—for decades as he struggled to express his thoughts, feelings, and make sense of what had happened in words.
Conversely, for Joan Didion, the reader gets the feeling the work had to be done immediately, as she experienced the pain. The Year of Magical Thinking is her memoir of loss and grief after her husband’s death. Written almost immediately after John Gregory Dunne died in 2003, the book chronicles her experience of living the first year following his death and the end of their 40-year marriage. Published in 2005, it won the National Book Award. The feelings she expresses are so raw, that at times while reading you feel almost as if the pages will slice your fingers.
Certainly not a Didion, I’ve traveled nearly as far from my defining moments as Maclean. But like both of them, I feel the same compulsions to make real, finally, the experiences that have shaped me. And that I can only write it, not speak it.
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Well said, Rita! A Grieve Observed by C. S. Lewis and the much more recent release, When Breath Becomes Air, also come to mind.
“ I feel the same compulsions to make real, finally, the experiences that have shaped me. And that I can only write it, not speak it.”
I can’t wait to read it!!!!