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Rating: 
Summary: Incredible
Review: Gornick's approach to the subject and her analysis of personal narrative = priceless. A thoroughly engaging read for those who are exploring how to become stronger writers of essays and/or memoirs. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: The Situation and The Story
Review: The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick is immensely entertaining while adapting an educational prose designed to enhance awareness of "self" as narrator. She uses excellent examples of non-fiction narratives that serve to further the invitation of speculation through tone, syntax, and perspective. The self as a persona is developed using wonderful writers such as Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, and Edmond Gosse. Vivian Gornick breaks down the writing barrier and gets right to the contents of human emotion. We are what we write, and our personal truths are conveyed in our words. She does a fabulous job taking a stand against the "boring, agitated" self and replaces that with the truth speaker who can move an essay forward creatively and effectively. Non-fiction can instruct without losing the personal voice. For anyone who likes to write, this book is the first step to question your narrative self and begin to discover the wonderful implications that "self" can bring to your writing. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: The Situation and The Story
Review: The Situation and the Story, by Vivian Gornick is immensely entertaining while adapting an educational prose designed to enhance awareness of "self" as narrator. She uses excellent examples of non-fiction narratives that serve to further the invitation of speculation through tone, syntax, and perspective. The self as a persona is developed using wonderful writers such as Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, and Edmond Gosse. Vivian Gornick breaks down the writing barrier and gets right to the contents of human emotion. We are what we write, and our personal truths are conveyed in our words. She does a fabulous job taking a stand against the "boring, agitated" self and replaces that with the truth speaker who can move an essay forward creatively and effectively. Non-fiction can instruct without losing the personal voice. For anyone who likes to write, this book is the first step to question your narrative self and begin to discover the wonderful implications that "self" can bring to your writing. I highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Thoughtful discussion, beautifully written
Review: Vivian Gornick invariably delights me, whether in her memoir, Fierce Attachments, her occasional essays in various journals, her book about reading, or this new one, which gave me a lot to think about.
The Situation and the Story focuses on essay and memoir-writing. Rather than trying to cover a lot of ground superficially, Gornick lays out one main idea and explores it in depth, using a wide variety of examples to illustrate her ideas. It was particularly helpful to have long excerpts from these examples, so I could really get a sense of the essay or memoir being discussed. She deals most intelligently with the question of the narrator -- the narrator's "persona" on the page, and the relationship of the narrator to her/his material.
As someone who writes and teaches memoir, I found this extremely helpful, but it will be equally interesting to anyone who writes or reads narrative nonfiction and wants to think seriously about it.
It is a great relief to find a book about writing that has gracefully sidestepped every pitfall of the advice genre. Gornick's style is respectful: she expects her readers to be as serious and smart about literature as she is herself and, even if we're not, we can always find a lot to think about in her work.
Rating:
Summary: A book that deserves the stature of its author
Review: Vivian Gornick writes beautifully, whether she's writing about love, politics, or the craft of writing. The Situation and the Story is based on her many years of teaching creative writing and focuses on ways of making nonfiction personal without wallowing in self-absorption. In other words, it helps writers discover where the 'universal truth,' the essence of Story, is in the millions of anecdotes in our lives.
As an author and writing teacher, I've found this book invaluable and have read it several times. My copy is well thumbed and appropriately coffee-stained.
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