Class 5 - Complex lives

Welcome Back

Welcome back! This week, we’re reading Fernanda Eberstadt’s “I Bite My Friends” — a challenging memoir that explores childhood and adulthood, art and gender and sexuality and friendship.

Great Lives vs. Messy Lives

One of the reasons I shared Eberstadt’s piece with you is because it is so messy: sometimes shockingly so.

Sometimes the idea of memoir can conjure an image of a stuffy and self-satisfied 19th century gentleman writing the story of his great deeds. You could call this style of memoir a “Great Lives, Great Deeds” memoir. Usually, even if they are fun to write, they are not much fun to read.

In her children’s books set in the fictional Moominvalley, Tove Jansson parodies this kind of memoir and memoir writer. Her character Moominpappa is perpetually writing a memoir about his heroic deeds (if you want to find out more, you can read her entertaining Moominpappa’s Memoirs, published by Sort of Books in 2017).

If memoir was only about people sitting down to write about their Great Lives and their Great Deeds, it would not be an interesting genre. It’s pretty boring hearing people talking about how great they are, or moralising about their view of the world.

But fortunately, contemporary memoir is much more diverse and interesting than this. It dives into the complex experience of being human, and shares this complexity through telling stories.

Response task

What I want us to start with is thinking about our responses to Eberstadt’s piece.

• Find an extract — it might be a single word, it might be a phrase, it might be a line, or it might be a paragraph — where you feel you can most closely identify with Eberstadt. Put this passage on the shared document without any comment.

• Find an extract — it might be a single word, it might be a phrase, it might be a line, or it might be a paragraph — where you feel most alienated by Eberstadt’s story. Put this passage on the shared document.

Now look at the collected extracts on the document. Choose one extract that you particularly respond to. It does not have to be the one you selected. Now write in the first person, in response to this passage, telling a story from your own experience.

For this exercise, I want you to focus on storytelling. In other words, I want you to focus not on sharing ideas (“family can be complicated”, or “art offers people on the margins a kind of freedom”) but on sharing stories (“these events took place, at a particular time and in a particular place”).

Discussion groups

Now I’m going to get you into discussion groups. I want you to do the following:

1. Start by taking turns to share extracts from these new pieces of writing. Remember, this is an opportunity, not an obligation. So you do not have to share if you don’t want to.
2. When everyone who wants to share has done so, talk about your responses to Eberstadt’s piece. How did it make you feel? What impressed you about her writing? What made you uncomfortable? What do you think she was trying to do?

We’ll share your thoughts in the main group.

Review Task

To think about questions of themes, I want you to do an exercise writing a short review essay responding to Eberstadt’s piece. Imagine that this is a review that might be published in a magazine or journal. Keep the language informal and non-academic: you are a human being responding to the writing of another human being, not a weird academic robot!

In this review what I want you to do the following:

1. Introduce the piece for readers who are unfamiliar to it
2. Discuss the main themes that Eberstadt explores (we’ll talk more about themes next time)
3. Talk about your responses to Eberstadt’s piece

Homework

Edit your review essay, then upload it to Canvas by the beginning of Thursday’s class.