Incidents and Stories

Liz Gilbert, in the essay, "Speak, Memory," says, this:

An incident is an event that happens in real time, with real consequences, usually involving real (and raw) human emotion.  A story is what you make out of it later.

I'm reading Joyce Maynard's memoir--At Home in the World. I can't put it down, except long enough to watch several interviews and talks on You Tube.

The incidents of my life and Joyce's life are not the same, but the story is so familiar that I often sit straight up in bed as if someone were describing my story.

The facts of our lives are not the same, but the milieu is the same--same television programs, same pre-feminism attitudes about girls and women, same political messes.  Joyce grew up in a very different geography and family, but the ideas that shape a generation of women cross those lines.

At seventeen, she was already a published writer--and she had the courage to ask major magazines for assignments.  She spent a year at Yale, then dropped out to live for a year with J.D. Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye.  She was 18; Salinger was 53.  She never completed a college degree.

The book (one of the 15 she's written) tells the story of that relationship and how it impacted her life as a young girl.

This video is a great companion to the book.  She briefly recounts the incidents of her time with Salinger, but she speaks powerfully also about the power of telling the truth as a writer--not glossing over the hardest things to tell.

"How long did it take you to write the book?" one audience member asks her.

"One month!" she says--as if the book literally poured out of her.  Then she pauses.  "One month--and the 25 years before I had the courage to tell the story."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRd8PTsquHI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Shk0nEAF5lU