Tayari's Blog: One of the Best Writers You Never Read
Posted by TayariJones on May 4, 2008 09:32 AM
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Bookshelf
One of the great things about the PEN World Voices Festival is that you get to hear from readers that you may have never heard of before. It drives me nuts to think of all the really interesting voices I will never know about because they haven't been published in the US.
One such writer that I discovered at the conference is P.F. Thomese. On Friday, I attended a panel about writing fiction and memoir. All of the panel talked about memoir and history and personal history in a very interesting, but sort of detatched manner. But then, Mr. Thomese, rather than was theoretical, read from a personal essay about the loss of his baby daughter. The room was pin silent when he finished. Any other conversation seemed irrelevant in the wake of such a moving and gorgeously written story.
I did some looking around and it turns out that the essay he read is on line. Here is an excerpt:
Isa, dearest, you swam like a little fish in your mother, you sprawled on your changing mat like the emperor of China. You demoted your parents to servants in a life over which they had formerly ruled. Just look at your father making a fool of himself, good thing no one can see him trying to close the snaps on your rompers with his fumbling fingers, while you, discerning as you are, scream at the top of your lungs.If my little girl had not died, I would probably never have written about her, about the snaps on her rompers. Then I had to, there was nothing else I could do. You come home from the hospital and the cradle is still standing there, as though nothing has happened. The things have no idea, they lie innocently in wait.
It goes without saying, does it not, that his memoir: Shadowchild is next on my to-read list.
(report on the entire panel, here.)
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Comment #1, by Michael Fischer ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.tayarijones.com/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
"I would have liked to talk more about converting such personal recollections into fiction, but the matter seemed really intimate and didn't seem to be appropriate for such a large venue, to be discussed among strangers, or even with me, a stranger to her, although I have read her work."-T
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This is also something I've been thinking about a lot lately. I love reading memoirs, but I'm a fiction writer; that's the realm I feel most comfortable in, yet I wonder with non-fiction/memoir being such a hot draw right now, if some writers who are more comfortable writing auto-biographical fiction are eventually talked into writing [subpar] memoirs...all in the name of getting published. How does this affect BOTH genres negatively?
May 5, 2008 11:43 PM