Jump to ratings and reviews
Rate this book

The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

Rate this book
A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love

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 reading 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, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, 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.

174 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Loading interface...
Loading interface...

About the author

Vivian Gornick

44 books899 followers
Vivian Gornick is the author of, among other books, the acclaimed memoir Fierce Attachments and three essay collections: The End of the Novel of Love, Approaching Eye Level, and, most recently, The Men in My Life. She lives in New York City.

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think?
Rate this book

Friends & Following

Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!

Community Reviews

5 stars
740 (30%)
4 stars
925 (38%)
3 stars
579 (24%)
2 stars
132 (5%)
1 star
31 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 306 reviews
Profile Image for julieta.
1,210 reviews28.2k followers
September 4, 2023
I absolutely loved it. I love Vivian Gornick because of her wonderful Fierce Attachments, and this is like taking a class with her. I recommend this to anyone who would like to write some form of essay or memoir, the way she helps you to read is just wonderful. I will look for some of the essays discussed here, but mostly I really appreciate her view on them, and she leaves me wanting to read more memoir, or more like read it differently, thinking of the possibility of writing.
She speaks of how in a novel, the author finds many different voices who can create dynamic, and in a memoir it must come from your own self investigating. Wonderful book.
===============================
Profile Image for El.
1,355 reviews497 followers
July 19, 2018
This slim volume is helpful to anyone writing essays or a memoir, primarily, but I think there's benefit to fiction writers reading this as well. The idea is simple, and one that is brought up all the time in workshops which can be one of the hardest questions to answer: What is the story?

Let me use myself as an example. I was writing an essay about what I thought was a trip I took to Alaska in high school, but the essay wasn't working. I was reading this book at the time and I realized, duh, that going to Alaska was the situation. The story, however, was my mom. Ugh. This led me to scrapping the original concept entirely and running with this realization, and that brings us up to date. The essay is working better now. But I have to constantly remind myself to stay on track with the story, and not get wrapped up in the situations. It's easy to do because I tend to wander and meander and, holy shit, where did I even wind up. I need to keep an eye on myself.
Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.
(p13)
Gornick goes on to use examples of essays that work for her which just adds to my reading list. She spends a little too much time, in my opinion, dwelling on some of the other writings which is a shame because it took away from her own thesis. I wanted to know what she thought about the craft more than what she thought about other examples, but I understand it can be a funky slope - hard to talk about one without flashing up some examples from which to make one's point.

Some pieces she referenced were Joan Didion's "In Bed", Harry Crews's "Why I Live Where I Live", and Edward Hoagland's "The Courage of Turtles."

She explains the distinction between an essay and a memoir - an essay is when a writer uses her persona to explore a subject other than herself, and a memoir is the reverse of that.

I'm still sorting that one out, but it's a good place to start.
It's the depth of inquiry that guides the personal narrative from essay into memoir.
(p85)
Gornick ends with suggestions for further reading, so here it is for posterity:
Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Judith Barrington
Modern American Memoirs; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley (eds)
I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory; Patricia Hampl
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Anne Lamott
Living to Tell the Tale: A Guide to Writing Memoir; Jane Taylor McDonnell
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir; William Zinsser (ed)
For the most part, a lot of great insights here, but got a little lost in some of her examples and lengthy thoughts on them.
Profile Image for Teresa.
Author 8 books949 followers
June 11, 2021
3.5

I don’t read many nonfiction narratives, but I enjoy Gornick’s writing about other writings, and this was no exception.

She starts off by describing and quoting from certain pieces by several essayists, including Joan Didion and Harry Crews, illustrating how a successful piece arises from the writer finding and then writing from a certain persona. She differentiates personal essay from memoir, as the former using their persona to explore a subject other than themself. One of her examples is Natalia Ginzburg’s ‘He and I’ (included in The Little Virtues, which I read recently, and after rereading my review I see that I used the word "persona"). She ends this section on essay with James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son,’ describing why it bridges both forms, that it is his “depth of inquiry [into the self] that guides the personal narrative from essay into memoir.”

The section on memoir includes a brief description of how Rousseau’s “I” is different from today’s “I,” before launching into Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and ending with W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn. Her lengthy section on Sebald posits emphatically that the work is not a novel, as it’s often described, and is a memoir. (I haven’t read it yet, so can’t say if I agree or not.) Along the way she compares Oscar Wilde and Thomas De Quincey and the unreliableness in their nonfictional works; explains how Marguerite Duras found her voice in The Lover.

She concludes from her own experience teaching in MFA programs that writing can’t really be taught, but that there is so much to learn through the reading and analyzing of other works, such as she has done here.
Profile Image for Thomas.
1,605 reviews9,917 followers
January 24, 2016
3.5 stars

A cerebral and abstract homage to the art of personal narrative. Vivian Gornick skips over the fundamental techniques of creative nonfiction to address the craft's deeper issues: the importance of empathy, the construction of the self, and how this style differs from fiction and poetry. She spends a large portion of the book analyzing other writers' work and dissects how they use their "selves" to separate the situation and the story. As a creative nonfiction fanboy, quite a few passages made me sigh in pleasure. One quote I enjoyed about the fashioning of a persona through nonfiction narrative:

"To fashion a persona out of one's own undisguised self is no easy thing. A novel or a poem provides invented characters or speaking voices that act as surrogates for the writer. Into those surrogates will be poured all that the writer cannot address directly - inappropriate longings, defensive embarrassments, anti-social desires - but must address to achieve felt reality. The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one... The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader."

Overall, a thoughtful and thorough examination of the essay and the memoir. Those who want more direct instruction may feel disappointed with this one, because Gornick shares a few gems about writing and then applies them to a gamut of work. Still, her years of experience and deep appreciation of the craft shine in The Situation and the Story. Would recommend for those who want to get serious with writing personal narrative. A couple more quotes I loved from the book to end this review:

"In all imaginative writing sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension... For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life."

"The idea of the self - the one that controls the memoir - is almost always served through a single piece of awareness that clarifies only slowly in the writer, gaining strength and definition as the narrative progresses. In a bad memoir, the line of clarification remains muddy, uncertain indistinct. In a good one, it becomes the organizing principle - the thing that lends shape and texture to the writing, drives the narrative forward, provides direction and unity of purpose. The question clearly being asked in an exemplary memoir is 'Who am I'? Who exactly is this 'I' upon whom turns the significance of this story-taken-directly-from-life? On that question the writer of memoir must deliver. Not with an answer but with depth of inquiry."
Profile Image for Lada Moskalets.
343 reviews51 followers
April 4, 2020
Це книжка про писання - але слухачі курсів про «написати-і-видати-бестселлер-за-три-місяці» розчаруються
Вівіан Горнік викладала письменницьке мистецтво п’ятнадцять років і після цього зробила два висновки. По-перше, неможливо навчити когось писати.
Відчуття стилю, структури, вміння писати так щоб сенси прозирали з-під напівпрозорої поверхні оповіді або є - або немає.
Але людей можна навчити читати.
Читати так, щоб розуміти про що насправді роман, оповідання, чи есей - не про те, що на поверхні, а про те, що глибше. Те, що вимагає сидіти і думати над текстом, перечитуючи його, і повертаючись до нього знову і знову. Горнік і її колеги критикують посібники з писання, які фокусуються на навиках, бо навики це вторинне. Вона наводить дуже гарну метафору - всі ми вміємо говорити, але лише деякі з нас є гарними співрозмовниками, що, наприклад, не забуваються у монологах.
Ця книжка - про есе і мемуари, і те, як інші письменники переформульовують свій особистий досвід як універсальний. Горнік цитує великі шматки текстів, які вважає вдалими (можна собі з них скласти список читання на майбутнє) і розмовляє про них, пробує зрозуміти, що стоїть за словамі. Головні принципи есе - автор має звучати вірогідно. Автор має знайти напругу і суперечності, знайти Іншого в собі - бо він чи вона є єдиними героями есе. І, разом з тим, есе має викликати у нас емпатію до того, хто говорить. Есе це дослідження самих себе і те, що ми пишемо про знайомі речі, не робить це завдання легшим.
Profile Image for Emma Scott.
Author 33 books8,039 followers
March 6, 2024
She’s hyper intellectual but man, is she good. The only thing I love more than writing is people talking about writing. This book did not disappoint, and its insight is helpful to my own memoir.
Profile Image for Ken.
Author 3 books1,044 followers
May 29, 2020
This book was recommended by a big-shot editor of a big-shot newspaper who accepts and publishes little-shot freelancers' personal narratives in the form of a column. Thus, I expected it would be rich with suggestions for writers new to nonfiction or looking for greater insight into nonfiction.

No, and no.

Turns out, the expected book about writing nonfiction is instead an unexpected book about reading nonfiction. I guess the opening paragraph to the final section of the book, "Conclusion," leaves a great hint as to why (albeit too late):

"This book grew out of fifteen years of teaching in M.F.A. programs, where I have learned that you cannot teach people how to write --- the gift of dramatic expressiveness, of a natural sense of structure, of making language sink down beneath the surface of description, all that is inborn, cannot be taught --- but you can teach people how to read, how to develop judgment about a piece of writing: their own as well as that of others. You can teach them how to puzzle out the experience buried in a mass of material and to see whether it is being shaped on the page; how to search out the link between a narrative line and the wisdom that compels it; how to ask, Who is speaking, what is being said, and what is the relation between the two? All this you can teach if it is your predilection so to teach. I discovered that it was mine."

Whew. Quite a disclaimer in a book some big editor suggests as writer's reading. I guess, then, you have to remind yourself again and again that writing is reading is writing is reading. Because in this book, Gornick simply goes from one wonderful essay or collection of essays or memoir to another, providing huge swaths of quotes and helping readers to see why they are so good.

What is the final result, you ask (or maybe don't ask, but are going to find out)? It turns out to be another one of those "reading about reading" books, where you wind up wanting to read most of the books the author alludes to because the quoted material sounds so good. An expensive book, then, in that the result is additional fodder for the Mudda of All To-Be-Read piles you are (like a literary Sisyphus) forever laboring on.

Here are some of the books Gornick uses to prove you can be taught to read better but NEVER (sigh) to write better:

On Aging (Jean Amery)
Notes of a Native Son (James Baldwin)
The White Album (Joan Didion)
All the Strange Hours (Loren Eiseley)
The Courage of Turtles (Edward Hoagland)
Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays (George Orwell)
The Rings of Saturn (W.G. Sebald)
The Duke of Deception (Geoffrey Wolff)
The Lover (Marguerite Duras)
The Little Virtues (Natlia Ginzburg)
West with the Night (Beryl Markham)
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Thomas De Quincey)
De Profundis (Oscar Wilde)
Profile Image for Sherard H.
19 reviews7 followers
March 5, 2011
Wait, Let Me Tell YOU

The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NYC
2001

"Here's the situation, and the story, and you can like it, or get out."~Vivian Gornick.

Just kidding. But she might as well have gone that far. The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick is a short novel about nonfiction writing, with a notable section on writing memoir. Gornick, who has taught M.F.A. classes concentrated in nonfiction and also in memoir, holds unique gems and insights into the world of writing nonfiction, most notably the eponymous difference between the situation in a piece, and its story. The situation is what the piece is about at face level (i.e., visiting one’s sister in Barbados), whereas the story pertains to the inner plots of the story (i.e., coming to terms with past wrongs). She produces a good sound byte or two, such as “it’s the absence of dynamism that keeps the essay static, stifles its growth from within.”

The piece primarily focuses on, however, quoting and analyzing essays and novels that Gornick enjoys or finds impertinent to nonfiction. It is therefore, a fusion of many different author’s writings, and Gornick’s opinion on what works or doesn’t work in the passages that she chooses to highlight.

I found this style to be as double-edged as the writing itself. At times, I thoroughly enjoyed the quoted pieces and therefore read Gornick’s notes with fervor. At other intervals, I found the pieces dull or impenetrable, and Gornick’s notes on them merely magnified in literary desiccation. Outside of her significantly separating the situation and the story, as well as suggesting a necessity for the narrator to be both what they are, and what they are not (“When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir—where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster—the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.”), Gornick offers little in advice or insight—she only blindly praises or scathingly disapproves. Perhaps the only way around this is to read the works in which she’s describing first hand, and then reread what she has to say, but as a stand-alone, I really don’t find her The Situation and the Story to be all that insightful.
Profile Image for Alaíde Ventura.
Author 5 books1,318 followers
September 24, 2020
La Biblia, simplemente. No sé por qué no la había calificado antes. La tercera relectura es la vencida (ajaaá, ya sé que tercera relectura es una cuarta lectura, puristas).
Profile Image for Jan Priddy.
781 reviews166 followers
December 27, 2019
I have mixed feelings. "There will be those to say . . . I am harsh, embittered." Yes, I would be among those to say that. The writing is compelling though somewhat repetitive, but the usefulness of this slim book as a tool in learning to write memoir is also slim. Further, Gornick has a dark view of life and of writing which is not to everyone's taste. This reads as an academic study, the sort of thing I might have written during the third term of my MFA. Mostly she quotes memoirists and then explains what these passages have to say about writing. I did not always agree.

She makes specific claims about the purpose for and practice of memoir. The first is the need for a persona on the page from which to reveal the story. We generally call this "voice" but I appreciated a new look at how that stance might be cultivated.

Second, she claims to show why memoir is increasing in popularity over novels, and that was a pure bust for me. Though I agree that memoirists are "telling the story we now want told" I did not buy most of her extravagant theoretical musings. Memoir is popular right now for the same reason bad novels and horror flicks and soap operas have been popular: we want a tragic and messy story to compare to our own sad and sorry troubles. The novelists she cites late in the book for their "gargantuan, language-besotted, mythical abstractions"—Pynchon, Powers, and DeLillo—are not authors I admire. Where are Morrison, Cisneros, Munro? Where is anyone not white and western? Well, never mind.

The final chapter (6 pages) is marvelous, despite beginning with the cliché of "you can't teach people to write." She offers a condensation of all her MFA-teacher wisdom, which is not always quite so wise as I might have wished, but not a bad overview of what we have all heard before. We must persist in our writing and develop more than craft. "What is it about?"

She quotes the before-and-after of an unattributed text from a student writing about the grandfather she never knew. Eventually the student understands that she is not writing about her grandfather at all but her abandoned grandmother. Brava, but I would say both student and teacher still miss the point. Her story is about the grandmother's stubbornness and persistence through loss and sorrow.

In fact all of the essays cited by Gornick share clear themes of bitterness, disappointment, loneliness, and lifelong isolation. "It was as a teacher of writing that I discovered that to know 'who is speaking, what is being said, and what is the relation between the two' had become my single-minded practice . . ." In the final paragraph she confesses:
"I find myself remembering all the people who, all along the way, as I confided one memoir or essay enthusiasm after another, repeatedly called to my attention not only the different kind of essays and memoirs I was ignoring but all that was not addressed what I was reading. True, I readily agreed . . . but secretly believed . . . inner coherence would prevail . . . "


Yes, the writing is strong. Gornick uses extensive passages from memoirs to illustrate points I would not have chosen. I hated The Lover because I felt it was written by an old woman who had lived on her charm and beauty and had nothing left once they were gone. Though I did not love her memoir so much as Out of Africa, I would never say Beryl Markham stands "awkwardly" at any point, much less on the page.

I found it ironic that she criticizes many authors here for their lack of self-awareness and seems to have none herself. Even acknowledging that others notice her narrow focus, she defends it. She sees only loneliness and isolation without looking for explanation or redress, without venturing beyond their despair or balancing with another sort of experience.

Granted, I have not read most of the sources Gornick uses, but neither would I want to. Her taste is completely unlike mine. These are too often the bitter and painfully alienated whimperings of middle-aged to aging men and a few women (including the author) who have wasted their emotional lives while pursuing opium or fame or scholarship or sex but without accomplishing any human connection. They grieve in terrible isolation.

I feel pity for the essayists, but no particular interest in dwelling in their reflections. And understand, until Markham's description of a horse, there are no scenes quoted here. This is abstraction and agony. All reflection and no meat.

Most people seem to like the first chapter best, but that was old news to me and not well supported in the rest of the book.

My advice? Pick this up in the bookstore and read the final chapter in five minutes. Unless you really want a lesson in despair and loneliness. In that case, read the whole damned thing.
Profile Image for Stephanie.
111 reviews5 followers
August 25, 2011
If Aristotle tells us that a writer must evoke ethos, pathos, and logos in order to craft a successful persuasive essay, Gornick fails at the first two miserably. Based on the introduction, she does not establish ethos - proving to the reader that she is knowledgeable about what she is writing on. There are no prizes for cramming as many words into a sentence as you can and phrasing things in the most oblique way possible. After the introduction, I couldn't trust anything she said (thus pathos was out the window.)
The rest of the book is a masterbatory exercise where she attmepts to explain her premise of "the situation and the story" (something I still do not understand and I read whole book.)Rather than providing information and then including an example essay for the reader to analyze themselves, Gornick opts to include excerpts of famous works (accompanied by synposis where necessary) and her own "in depth reading" of them. This feels self-serving and preening - particularly since she appears to be so proud of herself.
Profile Image for Ying Ying.
276 reviews123 followers
June 10, 2017
The title contains the main message of the book. Vivian, who teaches memoir writing, tells us that there are two components to the personal narrative: the situation and the story. This differentiation is enlightening because we often focus on the situation: the facts and the dates, while ignoring what makes an essay truly remarkable: the human story, e.g. of love or loneliness. The book explores this narrative duo by interpreting brilliant pieces of memoir. Like the author, we should learn to better read such essays in order to become better writers.
Profile Image for Carrie Poppy.
305 reviews1,176 followers
September 6, 2021
Had to read for a Harvard class. (Name drop; whatever no big deal.)

It’s good! Listen I have a lot of reading to do. I gotta go.
Profile Image for Claire.
701 reviews307 followers
March 19, 2020
A deliberate slow read for me as I wished to absorb the teaching, while researching and writing my own work, something definitely clicked in my understanding which I hope translates across into my writing.
On The Essay
In the first half Gornick dissects a few essays, citing them as evidence of her theory of the narrative that really demands attention and works, because it has been structured, attention being given to understanding the difference between the situation and the story.

A theory that came to her like an epiphany while attending a funeral, where one person in particular moved her more than the others.
Her words had deepened the atmosphere and penetrated my heart. Why? I wondered even as I brushed away the tears. Why had these words made a difference?

She concludes that because the narrator knew who was speaking, she always knew why she was speaking. She had created a 'persona' of herself in order to eulogize the deceased. An instrument of illumination.
The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

But getting from the understanding of a theory to being able to apply it in one's writing was something that eluded her until she analysed her own attempt of personal journalism (part personal essay and part social criticism) when she was invited to go to Egypt and write about the middle class existence in Cairo in the same way she had being doing while in New York. Overwhelmed by the energy of the city, the drama of its citizens, the work mimicked Egypt itself. It would take years before she was able to control the material with sufficient composure to serve the situation and narrate the kind of story she wished to share.
Every work of literature has bith a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

She then uses examples of demonstrative essays, sharing extracts to show this theory in it's most eminent form. Augustine's Confessions, Edmund Gosse's Father and Son, Orwell's Shooting an Elephant, Ackerley's My Father and Myself.

She compares a trilogy of essays that demonstrate the way self-implication can visibly shape a piece of nonfiction writing: Joan Didion's 'In Bed', Harry Crews's 'Why I Live Where I Live' and Edward Hoagland's The Courage of Turtles.
We are in the presence, in each instance, of a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows - moving from unearned certainty to thoughtful reconsideration to clarified self-knowledge. The act of clarifying on the page is an intimate part of the metaphor.


On The Memoir
Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened. For that, the power of the writing imagination is required.

She posits that modern memoir is of value to the reader only if it is able to dramatise and reflect on the experience of transformation or 'becoming' as the writer moves away from that person one has been told they should be towards the more authentic version that might be revealed beneath.

Quoting the example of Gosse's, Father and Son she observes:
That this son must come into his own by making war not on a parent who is willful and self-involved (which he is) but on one filled with the tender regard that alone gives a growing creature the ability to declare itself (which he also is). This is the thing the reader is meant to register; this is the narrator's wisdom. It is the betrayal of love that is required in order that one become.

These memoirs that succeed are works that record a steadily changing idea of the emergent self.
For each of them a flash of insight illuminating the idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the writer's organising principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament.


Ultimately the advice she gives is to aspiring writer's is to ask oneself certain questions, both in reading and in writing:
What, we would ask of the manuscript,was the larger preoccupation here? the true experience? the real subject? Not that such questions could be answered, only that it seemed vital to me that they be asked.
That exploration of the subconscious might precipitate insights to rise to the surface and spill over onto the page, by digging deeper, one may stumble across the inner context that makes a piece of writing larger than its immediate circumstance.
"who is speaking, what is being said, and what is the relation between the two" had become my single-minded practice"
She ends with an observation about timing, the thing that a can rarely predict.
Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at a time that we are reading.

This explains why a worthy book might be overly criticized while one of fleeting value is highly praised, the former, great though it may be, misses the mark because what it has to say can not be absorbed at the moment, while the latter
is well received because what it is addressing is alive - now, right now - in the shared psyche.Which is perhaps as it should be. The inner life is nourished only if it gets what it needs when it needs it.
Profile Image for Anton.
106 reviews
April 24, 2018
"You cannot teach people how to write." Any book that says that, I'm going to have a lot of problems with. The sentiment is more a reflection of bankrupt ideas about teaching than a judicious assessment of what can happen when a group of people get together to talk about writing and are provided structure and guidance in getting their own writing done. But, yes, you can't make people good writers by lecturing at them, nor under any circumstances are they likely to morph into "writers," whatever that means, over the course of a single semester.

So, the fact that I'm STILL giving this book five stars (because, yes, Gornick, a writing teacher writing a book on how to write, does say you can't teach writing), speaks volumes to the persuasive power of this book.

I'm not entirely sure how useful it's been in terms of my own writing, or how useful it would be to fledgling personal narrative writers (though I suspect I will assign it should I ever teach personal narrative again). It does raise questions of self-representation--through readings of a number of superior essays and memoirs, both widely acknowledged classics and lesser known gems--that I will be thinking about for a very long time. We are shown examples of what a working personal narrative looks like, and how it succeeds, but sometimes I wanted to hear more about HOW to do this in my own writing.

But this book is not going to spoon feed you craft tips--that's just not what it is, and I don't fault it for that.

What I was tempted to fault it for was a tone that sometimes felt authoritarian, though I'm not sure that word quite captures it. Her writing exhibits a control and focus that sometimes feels off-putting, but at its best is exhilaratingly clear and provocative.

When I realized this, I realized also that Gornick's book might be better read as a personal narrative in its own right, and as such it rivals any of the masters of the form she cites throughout its pages. We see her in every sentence, in every observation; it doesn't matter if we agree with her commentary--it's enough to see it realized. The book has its own situation and its own story. The situation is writing truth in the wake of postmodernism. And the story is how a single-minded, self-insistent art can most powerfully betray the very subjects it seems to deny: loneliness, vulnerability, the fear of losing oneself.
Profile Image for Leah.
2 reviews
September 18, 2013
I rarely write book reviews, but this book was so far from what it is presented to be that I felt I needed to let others know my observations about it.

I enjoyed the first 26 pages (the introduction), but reading the rest of the book was an exercise in frustration. The introduction explains the difference between a situation and a story in a piece of writing - very helpful. I thought the remainder of the book would continue to explain these differences and how to know which one is which in one's own writing. I was wrong.

The sections on essays and memoirs were mainly lengthy passages from the writings of others followed by Gornick's opinion on what was beautiful, effective, affecting, and worthwhile about the piece. My frustration with this format is that Gornick continued to use the word 'we' instead of 'I' to describe her own reactions, observations, and connections, thereby presuming that the reader felt the same way and interacted with the work in question in precisely the same way as she did. Presumptions of how the reader feels, thinks, and observes are rampant throughout this book. One should never write as if one knows how the reader understands and responds to a piece. This is a very basic rule of composition. If she had just had the courage to say 'I felt this...This is when I realized what the purpose of the story was...This is how I responded, etc' instead of trying to get me to believe that we shared identical thoughts and experiences, I wouldn't have disliked the book as much as I did. I still would have thought that everything beyond the introduction was unnecessary and not what the book purports to be about, but I wouldn't have hated it like I did.

If it hadn't been for her frequent and lengthy copying of works by other authors, the book would have been nothing more than a pamphlet, which is what it should have been. All Gornick needed to show the importance of the situation and the story and the power of knowing the difference as a writer was the first 26 pages. The remaining pages were filled with the writings of others, grammatical errors, and presumptions.
28 reviews2 followers
January 2, 2009
Vivian Gornick’s tremendous book on the craft of nonfiction writing, The Situation and the Story, is an exemplary resource for writers. In this book, Gornick discusses in great detail the art of writing personal essays and memoir. However, the driving force behind this book is how no one can be taught how to write; rather, outstanding nonfiction writers look at themselves with reflective introspection in order to connect with their subject matter. It is this introspection that draws the reader in to the writing.
Gornick draws upon the writings of other writers whom she believes to be emblematic of both strong and weak personal nonfiction writing. Substantial portions of the book are devoted to directly citing the writing of other authors. Gornick then interweaves her own lucid and enlightening analysis through the text in order to provide a larger context of understanding for the reader.

Profile Image for Cristina.
90 reviews
January 24, 2024
A mí leer a Gornick siempre me parece un regalo. A estas alturas de la partida su estilo es muy familiar para mí y aunque no sea el libro que más me ha gustado de su obra, es que es Vivian Gornick. Disfrutaría cualquier cosa escrita por ella, hasta el menú del día de una cafetería.

Aún así este libro es una profunda reflexión y un tema que se nota que tiene muy trabajado y reflexionado. Y yo siempre que la leo pienso, joder, que tía más lista, de verdad que no se puede ser más lista. Por qué esa forma de hilar, de argumentar, de enlazar un tema con otro, solo lo puedo hacer ella.
Profile Image for Natalie.
90 reviews12 followers
Read
September 5, 2023
Didn’t think I could appreciate the art of personal writing more, but here we are.

“my classes would be reading as I needed to read: looking for the inner context that makes a piece of writing larger than its immediate circumstance; places a writer’s thought and feeling; imposes its shape and reveals inner purpose”
Profile Image for Nic.
687 reviews15 followers
July 10, 2022
Gornick never disappoints. Interested to read Jean Amery’s essays on ageing.

“Then we become strangers to ourselves. We look in the mirror and are startled, if not shocked, by the face that looks back at us. This is a shock from which we never recover; it, too, is with us day after day (the irony here being that it is only now that we actually see ourselves with any clarity.” (Jean Amery, p59)

“In the life of every human being there is a point in time…where each discovers that one is only what one is. All at once we realise that the world no longer concedes us credit for our future, it no longer wants to entertain seeing us in terms of what we could be…
We find ourselves…to be creatures without potential. No one asks us any longer, ‘What do you want to do?.” (Jean Amery, p62-63)

Profile Image for Sandra.
657 reviews35 followers
February 23, 2020
Es muy útil para aprender a leer. Para leer con criterio y capacidad de análisis. Y me ha enseñado a un autor nuevo.
Profile Image for Aina Capó.
75 reviews2 followers
January 24, 2024
¿Per què?, em vaig preguntar mentre m'eixugava les llàgrimes. ¿Per què m'havien marcat aquestes paraules i no unes altres?
27 reviews1 follower
February 8, 2023
Loved the discussions about the relationship between writing persona and the self, the process of self-actualisation through the writing and the importance of building tension/texture to each piece with examples with examples of writers she admires.
Profile Image for Molinos.
346 reviews557 followers
July 5, 2019
Es un ensayo, casi un libro de texto, sobre como enfrentarse a la escritura de no ficción, a unas memorias, a un texto de carácter personal. La idea principal de Gornick, con la que estoy de acuerdo, es que contar tu vida no tiene ningún valor literario, el valor se lo da encontrar tu propia voz narrativa y la posición desde la que contarlo. Gornick comienza su ensayo contando como asiste a un funeral en el que escucha las distintas intervenciones que allegados de la fallecida van haciendo y como todas ellas le resultan indiferentes, aburridas, hasta que se encuentra conmovida profundamente por uno de esos discursos. Cuando llega a casa y reflexiona sobre el impacto de las palabras de la desconocida para saber qué tuvo de distinto para conmoverla tanto:

«That was it, I realized. It had been composed. That is what had made the difference. `[...] because the narrator knew who was speaking, she always knew why she was speaking»

Gornick insiste en como ser un notario de tu vida y contar los hechos de la manera más objetiva posible no tiene ningún valor literario. Hay que enfrentarse a la propia vida, a los hechos, a los recuerdos, bucear en la memoria intentando encontrar en ese material que no vale nada, un sentido, un significado que no viste en su momento, que ni siquiera sabías que podía tener y convertirlo en algo que incumba al lector, algo que le interese, algo con lo que se identifique y que resuene en él.

«The piece builds only when the narrator is involved not in a confession but in this kind of self-investigation, the kind that means to provide motion, purpose and dramatic tension. Here, is self-implication that is required»

No voy a aburrir más con este libro que recomiendo solo para aquel que quiera escribir no ficción o aprender a leerla de una manera más académica. Gornick escribe, como siempre, maravillosamente bien y resulta amena, interesante y didáctica. Analiza y recomienda un montón de libros y ensayos breves
Profile Image for Laryssa Wirstiuk.
Author 3 books60 followers
October 25, 2011
Always happy to read books about the craft of writing, I was excited to absorb any wisdom that Vivian Gornick could impart. Overall, I think the concept of this book is wonderful - understanding the difference between what she calls "situation" (the setting or circumstances) and the "story" (the narrative voice that rises up from the situation) is important for any writer. However, she only devotes a few pages to directly addressing the concept. Where is the practical advice? How am I to benefit from this? She spends the next 75% of the book citing examples of both essays and memoirs that she has enjoyed. I THINK that she's trying to show how the authors navigate both situation and story, but I really would have liked for her to make these distinctions more explicit and then eventually show me how to apply these same techniques in my own writing. Reading excerpts out of context doesn't really help me. To be fair, in the concluding section, Gornick does admit that she doesn't think it's possible to teach writing. She believes she can only teach someone how to read. Why write a book on the art of personal narrative then? I think the book "Tell It Slant" is a better use of time.
Profile Image for Brittany Meghan.
10 reviews
December 25, 2019
Overall, this book provides solid information. However, the reason I give it two stars is that I've read various "How to write a memoir" books in the past year and they're all so flowery. The authors write like memoirists who have been asked to write a manual. By this I mean the writer shows examples of good writing instead of telling what exactly at a fundamental level good writing is.

I wished instead the author of this book consolidated the advice, provided practical tests to see if a piece of writing achieves her criteria, and shared references to her favorite examples in a bibliography format. This could chop at least 50% of the book.

Maybe I'm missing the point, or maybe I'm too much of an engineer, but these types of books don't need to be so over-the-top.
4 reviews
August 16, 2015
Well worth the read - especially if you're writing a memoir. In The Situation and the Story, Vivian walks her audience through a number of successful memoirs, drawing connections between tone of voice and meaning. It goes a lot deeper but that's the main vein of thought. enjoyed her writing and learned a great deal about voice.
54 reviews1 follower
February 4, 2024
“From the first I thought to teach writing was to teach my students how to keep on reading until we all saw as clearly as we could what was driving the writer.”

This book is an exploration of memoir. It is also a testament to the delicate relationship between the writer, the narrator, the reader and the Truth. Gornick has lost faith in modern fiction to perform under this pressure. So she is looking beyond fiction for meaningful narrative.

And along the way she introduces readers to some spectacular works by authors known and less well known:

J. R. Ackerley
Edmund Gosse
Joan Didion
James Baldwin
Geoffrey Wolff
Agnes Smedley
Loren Eisley (autobiography)
Beryl Markham
Marguerite Duras
and
W. G. Sebald

“It is, I think, a measure of the bankruptcy of fiction that The Rings of Saturn is repeatedly called a novel. Sebald is doing an old fashioned thing here, entering into the narrating self in a way that ignores modernism and postmodernism alike and is far from the gargantuan, language-besotted, mythical abstractions of contemporary fiction writers like Pynchon, Powers, and DeLillo s literature will allow itself to go. Yet the critics cannot believe that the power to make us feel this, our one and only life, as very few novels actually do these days, is coming from a memoirist - a nonfiction truth speaker - who has entered our common situation and is telling the story we now want told. But it is.”

This is a journey I wish I had taken earlier.
Profile Image for Kenya Stéphanie.
87 reviews17 followers
February 21, 2024
Tenía unas ganas impresionantes de leer este libro y me da pena reconocer que en ocasiones se me ha hecho bola. He leído que no soy la única que he tardado en entender a dónde quería llegar con lo que explicaba y eso me consuela.
Al final del libro entiendes que Vivian Gornick te quiere enseñar a leer. Para ello, te pone muchísimos ejemplos de autores muy diversos (y algunos muy interesantes), señala partes curiosas de fragmentos de ellos y analiza lo que se acaba de tratar en el fragmento señalado. Por esto mismo, a veces resultaba obvio e incluso pesado que nos explicara de nuevo lo que acabábamos de leer.
He echado de menos ver más sobre la experiencia de Vivian. Cada vez que reflexionaba sobre algo ajeno a estos autores las palabras brillaban.
Las últimas 30 páginas me han gustado muchísimo y, sobretodo y en términos generales, este libro me ha servido de inspiración para mis futuros escritos. He hecho muchos apuntes sobre él y me ha parecido una lectura interesante aunque, en definitiva, se ha quedado muy por debajo de mis expectativas.

[...] el escritor es en sí un hombre que salió tiempo atrás de su propio caos y ahora trabaja en un estado de equilibrio interior.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 306 reviews

Can't find what you're looking for?

Get help and learn more about the design.