Vivian Gornick. The Situation and the Story. New Edition for Writers, Teachers, and Students. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001. 174 pages.
This brief guide to writing personal narrative has several useful insights. Gornick’s biggest and best idea is that good narrative non-fiction must capture both the situation–the factual account of what happened and to whom–and the story, the underlying emotional truth. This is excellent advice for writers of any skill level.
Gornick draws on several memoirs, famous and obscure, to make her point: George Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and Seymour Kirm’s “For My Brothers and Sisters in the Failure Business” are just two of the best examples. These snippets help the reader see for himself what good writing is.
In addition to the helpful suggestions on writing, there is a barrel full of literary navel-gazing that I didn’t quite understand. For example, while talking about the reversal of the modernist triumph of voice over narrative, Gornick writes, “At the same time that the power of voice alone has been dwindling, an age of mass culture paradoxically much influenced by modernism has emerged on a scale unparalleled in history, and today millions of people consider themselves possessed of the right to assert a serious life.” I think the gist is that because more people can publish, they want to write, but it seems a rather indirect and jargon-heavy way of saying it.
The Situation and the Story is a very good prompt for writing personal narrative–there are several questions and exercises at the back of the book that can help the writer. I’d just buy it with the caveat that if you’re not up on what’s being taught in MFA programs, much of the theorizing will likely be opaque to you, as it was to me.