On Narrators, Memoir, and the “Pretty Shabby Stuff” Inside

Author Gary Presley is an occasional contributor to both Brevity and the Brevity Blog, and author of Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio, new from the University of Iowa Press.  We recommend his memoir, and recommend his thoughts on sypathetic and unsympathetic narrators:

I help lead a group that discusses creative nonfiction. There’s about thirty of us exchanging emails, and we all profit in dissecting an essay or a book chapter every week. In fact, I’ve hit up (Brevity editor) Dinty W. Moore regarding his editing experiences, particularly about publishing a piece with an unattractive or unsympathetic narrator.

I always knew I could be a jerk, although I don’t think it really came through in my writing when I stuck to essays. What I did learn when I set out to write in a longer form, though, is interesting. It may be a tough gig to be a jerk in real life, it’s even tougher as being a jerk who wants to write a memoir.

I’m what’s referred to as a “polio quad,” most likely the result of what is now called a “vaccine accident.” That happened long ago and far away. As you might expect, it made me angry, bitter, and oftentimes frustrated with my lot. But that’s something I hide from most people most of the time, even when I wrote op/eds about disability issues.

One day, though, I was inspired to write a wry and ironic essay about one of the practicalities of using a wheelchair — the essay was entitled “A Pot to Pee in.”

Why? I think because I was in the mood to be honest, perhaps even to be honest with myself, which is a trait I urge on others but often avoid on my own. Something good came of it, though. I discovered readers like honesty. In fact, several in my critique group said, “This is good. You need to write a memoir.”

And so I did. It’s called Seven Wheelchairs: A Life beyond Polio.

In writing the book, I did go beyond polio, down toward a place where I learned something about my life, about the person I had become, about living “boob-high to the world,” as my wife describes it.

What interested me, though, is more than one reader seemed puzzled over the anger and frustration and bitterness within the memoir. “That’s not the Gary I know.”

Sure enough. I was right. I am a jerk, at least sometimes, and thankfully mostly in private. I always knew there was wisdom in the novelist Peter DeVries’ observation, “Human nature is pretty shabby stuff, as you may know from introspection.”

But in writing the book, I also learned I am an observer, a person honest enough to recognize that element of jerkiness, forgive himself for it, and understand that by offering something “so bitingly honest that … readers sometimes cringe before turning the page … ” that I have been able to illustrate disability is a normal aspect with the human condition and to change a few minds about what it means to live with a disability, to recognize the need for equal access, and to think hard thoughts about institutional care and end-of-life issues.

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Gary Presley www.garypresley.com
SEVEN WHEELCHAIRS: A Life beyond Polio
Fall 2008 University of Iowa Press

Creative. Nonfiction. Nothing New.

From Gary Presley, author of the new memoir Seven Wheelchairs:

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I’m surprised no one in my writing discussion group has quoted Oscar Wilde to me. “I may have said the same thing before…but my explanation, I am sure, will always be different.”

Too often when we discuss the art of creative nonfiction, I say that people can roll on the ground, kick their heels, and scream “No!” but creative nonfiction was a real thing long before Gay Talese wrote the inimitable “Mr. Sinatra Has a Cold” or Tom Wolfe wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Take George Orwell’s “A Hanging.” Or better, read Ernie Pyle’s “The Death of Captain Waskow.”

Creative. Non. Fiction.

Both are as nuanced as Talese’s “Mr. Sinatra.” Talese doesn’t tell the reader that Sinatra is unstable, insecure, sometimes overbearing man with enormous talent, but a sophisticated reader sees all that, and more.

Ernie Pyle’s “Captain Waskow” provides art with the same layered dept, art that opens another window on the human condition, art offering up by the heart of a man worn down by war, a man telling us how hard it is sometimes to be a thinking-feeling creature on this earth.

Oh, there are differences, but those revolve more around subject than style. Talese’s essay on the Chairman of the Board pretends an intimacy that masks it’s ironic distance. Pyle’s lament for Waskow is about Waskow, but the good captain is also symbolic. Pyle substitutes empathy and compassion and stark reality for irony, but there is another deeper, more existentialist layer that allows the reader a glimpse in the mirror of mortality, a place where we each can glimpse our deaths smiling from behind the dark curtain of consciousness.

Gary Presley
http://garypresley.blogspot.com/
http://www.garypresley.net/

From Gary Presley: Navel Gazing in Creative Nonfiction

presley

A group of accomplished writers I pal around with in the virtual world recently discussed a long’ish essay about … well, about growing up under tough circumstances, which seems to be one of the primary themes within the genre. (Augusten Burroughs and A Wolfe at the Table, anyone?)

My reaction? I jumped into the fray waving the flag of anti-narcissism. So the author had a crappy childhood? As Mr Tolstoy said, “All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

That she has made literature of it is good. That she has taught me to care, I’m not sure; or at least, I don’t care any more than I might about any other child growing up in similar circumstances. That she can write elegantly about the issue – granting that she may feel more deeply, feel more pain than a person less intelligent or sophisticated – surely provides some reconciliation unavailable to the less intelligent or talented.

Each time I stumble across creative nonfiction in a similar vein – and there’s millions of little pieces of that I had it tougher than you literature out there – I wonder “Is too much of our genre too centered on navel-gazing? And, the corollary question: “Is navel-gazing the antithesis of an intellectual pursuit?”

Or to put it another way, “Does the genre rely too much on memoir to be intellectually-influential in the way society perceives useful intellectualism?”

Or to put it a third way, “Are we memorists and navel-gazers getting a free ride on the coat-tails of John McPhee, Barry Lopez, Lewis Thomas, Edward Abbey, Edward Hoagland, Richard Selzer, Paul Theroux, et al?

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Gary Presley
http://garypresley.blogspot.com/
http://www.garypresley.net/