Synopses & Reviews
In these highly personal essays and powerful tales that verge on memoir, Merrill Joan Gerber opens to us her life and work as a writer. She is candid and unflinching in revealing the truths and inventions of a writer’s vision and the use of life as the raw material of art. Her personal essays range widely, from the mysteries of love and marriage to painful encounters with suicides and family deaths.
Gerber writes of her apprenticeships with celebrated writing teachers Andrew Lytle and Wallace Stegner and recounts her ghostly (and ghastly) experiences during a month at Yaddo, the famous retreat for artists. Gerber includes three pieces in the book—originally published as stories—but which blur the line between fiction and memoir, demonstrating Gerber’s contention that the deepest secrets in life beget the most passionate fictions.
Review
"These pieces move back and forth across the boundary between memoir and fiction. Vivid and gripping, they offer memorable characters and events. One narrative moves deeply into a marital relationship—suggesting a kind of paradigm for the systole and diastole of marriage that I found profoundly moving. And troubling. And satisfying."—Janet Burstein, Drew University
Review
“One reads Gerber headlong, driven to turn her pages as rapidly as possible, leaping toward resolution.”—Cynthia Ozick
Review
"Handled with subtle humor and disarming honesty, Gerber’s narrative ultimately uncovers a core truth about travel: to surrender to a place, not the version from one’s fantasies but as it really exists, is the only way to experience it."—Los Angeles Times
Synopsis
With this collection of personal essays, Merrill Gerber, a widely and well-published novelist and short story writer, has painted a vivid portrait of herself as a writer and offered an honest glimpse of the inspiration for her own creative process. Through vibrant narratives that self-consciously waver on an ambiguous border between memoir and fiction, Gerber transfixes the reader with genuine accounts of her philosophies and samples of her life. The final three pieces of the collection, originally written as fiction, are included here as memoir to demonstrate her contention that the deepest truths in life can be and often are the greatest source from which to draw the best told lies in fiction. This book will appeal to teachers and students of writing as a study on the craft of writing as well as the general reader interested in the writing process.
About the Author
Merrill Joan Gerber teaches creative writing at the California Institute of Technology. Her most recent book is
Botticelli Blue Skies: An American in Florence, also published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Her many novels, short story collections, and non-fiction works include
King of the World, The Kingdom of Brooklyn, Anna in Chains, Anna in the Afterlife, and
Old Mother, Little Cat.
Table of Contents
Follow the thread into the labyrinth : a fond recollection of Andrew Lytle -- Wallace Stegner and the Stanford Writing Workshop -- A month in the country at Yaddo -- The lost airman -- The treasures we held -- Getting mother buried -- "Look how she holds his hand" -- My suicides -- The harpsichord on the mountain -- "This is a voice from your past" -- "I don't believe this" -- "Tell me your secret" -- A few words.