Your Love Life in Six Words

Last year, Smith magazine published a fascinating collection of six-word memoirs, inspired by the one left behind by Hemingway (”For sale: baby shoes, never worn”). On my other blog, I wrote a handful of my own condensed autobiographies. Among them:

-Passionately, I lived, loved, hated, died.

-Wanted to be Bea Arthur. Failed.

-Spent too much time answering phones.

-Read with abandon. Glimpsed God there.

-Met Meryl, but never banged Brody.  (Note: Booksnark looooooves him some Adrien Brody. Like, dayum and yum.)

-Alas, I am just too much.*

(*Thanks, Bette Davis. I stole that line from a Barbara Walters interview she once did.)

Now the fine folks over at Smith are at it again, asking writers to describe their love lives in tiny little six-word epics. The results range from hilarious to heartbreaking and are presented in a new book, Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak by Writers Famous and Obscure. Here’s a sampling of some of the entries:

If I get Chlamydia, blame MySpace.
- Hanorah Slocum

Will government ever let us marry?
- Viki Marsh

Silently suffered his facial hair experiments.
- Elizabeth Minkel

Tried men. Tried women. Like cats.
- Dona Bumgarner

Leap of faith. Shit, no parachute.
- Katherine Yunker

Inevitably, his obituary didn’t mention me.
- R. Sue Dodea

Read more and listen to the full story at the NPR website.

Story Source  NPR

February 11, 2009 | Filed Under Authors, Biography & Memoir | 4 Comments 

Former Administration to Write Books

Who knew they could even read?

I kid, I kid.

It seems the whole gaggle of Bush’s recently-departed team have decided to write memoirs.

Laura Bush just signed with Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, to pen her life story. It’s slated for publication in spring 2010. “I am very pleased to be associated with Scribner, the distinguished publishing house of many of my favorite books,” the former First Lady said. “I look forward to working with Scribner and the Simon & Schuster team as I tell the stories of the extraordinary events and people I’ve met in my life, particularly during my years in the White House.” Mrs. Bush, a former librarian, has long been a literacy advocate and book nut.

Republican Karl Rove, Dubya’s former adviser, is also on tap to write his story. He has signed a $1.5 million contract with Threshold Editions, another Simon & Schuster imprint. ”All of us at Threshold are thrilled to publish the book from the man who had the president’s ear for two terms,” said Threshold publisher and executive vice president Louise Burke said.

Both Mrs. Bush and Rove are being represented by superstar Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, who negotiated their contracts (<snark comment> and I’m sure got them just what they so desperately need: even more money! </snark comment>). Barnett also represented President Obama and former President Clinton when they penned their books.

Condoleeza Rice has confirmed that she will start slinging the ink, too. The former Secretary of State — herself represented by the illustrious William Morris Agency – will be meeting with publishers to discuss multiple book projects, including a memoir of her service in the Bush administration. Details are sketchy, and all talks are in the early stages.

How much truth will actually be included in these books is, of course, debatable. I just hope Mrs. Bush throws in a recipe for opossum.

 

Story Sources  Politico, breitbart.com, Yahoo  |  Image Source  lies.com

January 21, 2009 | Filed Under Biography & Memoir, Newsies, Politics | 2 Comments 

Book Review: Heaven’s Coast by Mark Doty

After having my little snark socks blown off by his Fire to Fire (my pick for Best Book of ‘08), I vowed to read anything and everything by Mark Doty. His poems are incandescent, probing, challenging lyrical memoirs in verse-form; his words affect me like very few writers ever have, cracking my world open and letting the light in, no matter how warm or welcome, scorching or painful. In short, I treasure the work of Mr. Doty.

It comes as no surprise that Mark Doty is just as adept at prose as he is at poetry. 2007’s Dog Years is a loving paean to his beloved dogs, and how their love and devotion carried him through some of the darkest hours of his life. It is precisely those dark hours that are examined minutely in an earlier work of memoir, 1997’s Heaven’s Coast, which is, I think, one of the finest, bravest books ever written on the subject of grief.

In 1989, Doty’s longtime partner Wally tested HIV positive, while Doty himself tested negative, but “it didn’t matter which of us it was,” he writes. “…His news was mine.” Like all solid unions, the boundaries between the two individuals had, to a point, blurred; they were both affected by this diagnosis and they would see one another through.

“Through”, not incidentally, is the name of the book’s second part. The first part, “Coastal Studies”, explores the immediate impact of Wally’s death (of an AIDS-related viral brain infection in 1994), as well as another crushing blow to the author: the death of his best friend, the poet Lynda Hull, in a car accident. In “Coastal Studies”, Doty dives — is pushed, more accurately — into a sea of grief and sorrow, and, using language and metaphor as only a truly great poet can, he finds meaning and message in nearly everything around him. Heaven’s Coast, as well as being a story of loss, is also a breathtaking homage to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and it is in Provincetown’s rich coastal beauty, its stunning contradictions and embracing nature, that Doty finds the courage to live, to write, and to be transformed. “A coast is not a line really but a borderland, site of a continual conversation between elements which transforms both,” he writes.

It is in the book’s second section, “Through”, that we go back in time to the diagnosis and through the ensuing years leading up to “Coastal Studies”. Doty revisits the terrain of his lover’s decline, friends’ support, doctors’ ineptitude (anything medical professionals could not explain, which was a lot in the early 90s, they wrote off as “viral activity”), and the passionate history shared between two people in love. Doty is able, at least in retrospect, to glean magnificent wisdom from Wally’s slow exit from this world, as well as Lynda’s abrupt one, and this wisdom, these lessons and insights, are — contrary to what one might think — anything but depressing. They are, in a word, an inspiration.

Heaven’s Coast is a love letter to a departed partner, to a deceased friend, to a beloved seaside town, and, perhaps above all else, to the healing, transformative power of language.  Grade: A+

 

Title  Heaven’s Coast: A Memoir

Author  Mark Doty

Publisher  HarperCollins

Year Published  1997

ISBN  0060928050

Snarkbytes  Mark Doty reads “Charlie Howard’s Descent”, which appears in Fire to Fire, as well as 1987’s Turtle, Swan.

 

January 15, 2009 | Filed Under Biography & Memoir | 1 Comment 

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      WHAT IS A SNARK?




      The Snark is a creature created by Lewis Carroll in his poem "The Hunting of the Snark". To give a proper description of Snarks, one must look no further than Carroll himself, who summed them up in one word: Unimaginable.

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