Category: literary life

Richard McCann, whose Mother of Sorrows has just come out, is interviewed over at The Happy Booker. Here’s a snippet:

I have read that [McCann’s current project, The Resurrectionist] touches on some autobiographical facts of your life, yet you decided to write this as fiction, not memoir. Where do you draw the line? And is it necessary for the reader to draw the line? Have you deliberately blurred this line and should there even be a line?

I never really “decided” between fiction and memoir. I started, as I always do, with facts; eventually, I saw I had deviated far enough from the starting points as to have made a work of fiction. There was a cartoon in The New Yorker a couple of years ago that I loved: a man is standing in a bookstore in which the sections are marked with titles like “Memoirish” and “Fictionish,” as opposed to “Memoir” and “Fiction.” That’s a bookstore, I suspect, in which my work belongs.

I’m back from the L.A. Times Festival of Books and have some pre-posted items below about panels, readings, and events I attended during the weekend. Things are likely to be slow here for the rest of the day as I catch up with email, mail, work, and more work, but check back again in the early afternoon for new stuff.

On Sunday afternoon, I went to the Memoir: Family Matters panel, which featured Diana Abu-Jaber, Karen Stabiner, Michael Datcher, Debra Ginsberg, and Louise Steinman. I confess I rarely read memoirs these days as I’m so pressed for time and want to keep up with fiction, but I went to the panel because I did read an advance review copy of Abu-Jaber’s book The Language of Baklava. It’s about her growing up in upstate New York and in Jordan, experiencing both societies, and about all the conversations that happened at mealtimes, when her father served tasty meals and shared stories with his family. Abu-Jaber and other panelists read from their books and fielded several questions that also seemed to revolve around whether truth was best represented in fiction or memoir.

Later that afternoon, I checked out the PEN/Emerging Voices event and listened to fellows read from their work. I particularly enjoyed Alia Yunis’s story (about an overweight teenager growing up in 1980s Lebanon, who worries about cute boys and calories even as a bomb explodes outside her apartment.) I look forward to reading some of her work in print.

I went to Andrew Sean Greer’s book signing on Sunday morning, and got a chance to chat with him about his lovely book, The Confessions of Max Tivoli. I bought a paperback edition of it with the intention of having him sign it so I could give it away on the blog, but I couldn’t resist keeping it. Sorry, guys. But really, if you haven’t read this amazing book, you should.

The Mountain Bar was a packed house on Saturday night for the latest in Jim Ruland’s Vermin series. The readers included (in order) Julianne Flynn, Lisa Glatt, Alex Lemon, Mark Sarvas, Steve Almond, yours truly, Ben Ehrenreich, and Dylan Landis. Julianne and I had exchanged emails a few times before Saturday so it was a pleasure to finally meet her and hear her read from her novel. Lisa Glatt wowed the house with “Soup,” an amazing story that appears in the current issue of Swink. Alex Lemon read several poems, some of which were about his brain surgery (my favorite? “M.R.I.”) Mark Sarvas read a hilariously funny excerpt from his novel Obiter Dicta (I didn’t know he could do such a great Polish accent.) Steve Almond read a very graphic piece that delighted a few people and horrified others (so what else is new?). Having read Ben Ehrenreich before, I knew he was talented, but I didn’t know he was so young. And Dylan Landis ended the evening on a high note. The material was very eclectic (funny, serious, sexy, heartbreaking) though the men readers all picked material that involved sex in one way or another. (Coincidence? you decide).

I stopped by the Vermin/Swink booth later on Saturday afternoon, and found Mark busily live blogging. Jim was sporting a Chinese hat to promote the evening’s reading in Chinatown. And Samantha Marlowe was selling copies of the newest issue of the magazine. By the time I sat down to blog, Mark’s connection was lost and so we did the next best thing: talked about blogs. People stopped by and asked us all sorts of questions–from ladies with purses (“Now what’s a blog again?”) to entrepreneurial authors (“Are you interested in reviewing my book?”) to old gentlemen foaming at the mouth (“I knew a Moorish guy once, he lived in Belize.”)