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Eberstadt’s piece is about the complexities of friendship. Friendship plays a big role in our lives, but it is often complex and messy. One of the great things about Ebserstadt’s work is that she doesn’t hide away the mess. She doesn’t have any obvious lessons to teach us. She is just talking about the complexity of a human relationship, a friendship.
Today—because I have a fever, so don’t want to talk too much!—I’m going to get you to do a lot of writing. But first, I want to put you in groups to talk about the main themes in Eberstadt’s essay.
Discussion
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What are the main themes in Eberstadt’s essay?
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How does she explore these themes?
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How do you feel about a) Fernanda Eberstadt and b) Stephen Varble, having read the essay?
One thing we’re going to focus on today is writing more complete and convincing scenes. Let’s look at Eberstadt, and how she builds a really vivid picture of her friendship with Stephen, and her world.
Analysis
In her book The Memoir Project (2011), writer Marion Roach Smith gives the following ‘formula’ for understanding the art of the memoir.
It’s about x (a topic) as illustrated by y (scenes) to be told in a z (form).
This feels a little abstract. But what Smith is really saying is that a memoir needs the following:
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A theme, topic or thread (or a set of themes/topics threads) running through it.
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A series of scenes, stories or incidents that throw light on this theme.
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A way of ordering these scenes or incidents into an overall shape or form.
Go through Eberstadt’s essay, and mark the individual scenes that she shows the reader. Now try to break up the text with titles. Each new scene should have a new title. Write a bullet-point list of titles for the different sections of the essay.
Writing exercise
- Think about a friendship that has been both important to you, but also complex. Who was your friend? Where did the complexity lie? Now take two or three individual scenes from this friendship (when you first met, perhaps, or a significant event in your friendship), and write these scenes.