Name: Margo Koss's review of The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick
Item: The Situation and the Story
Author: Margo Koss

Vivian Gornick

Taking readers on a 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, and Marguerite Duras.

The Art of Personal Narrative

The Situation and the Story

Margo Koss

Very helpful framework in here for writing non-f (essay and memoir). She uses good examples to illustrate her ideas. But a lot of her other analysis was pretty subjective (yet spoken like objective truth) and frankly off-base, not to mention overall she’s pretty pompous / blowing a lot of hot air. 

Giovanni Garcia-Fenech 

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.

Margo Koss &
The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick

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Margo Koss &The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick

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Join the club

Margo Koss &
The Situation and the Story by Vivian Gornick