THOMAS LARSON

(Contrary Magazine July 9, 2012)

Suicides Are Painful

Many who read Sarah Manguso’s first memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), were in awe of the tale and its teller. At twenty-one, Manguso contracted an autoimmune blood disease that grew into nine years’ of transfusions, paralysis, and depression. It seemed the only way she could write about the debilitation was in short chapters, each a high-wire act that combined medical fact, incisive description, and intense but transient emotion. The terse style seemed to be holding back a floodgate.

Much of the same approach structures The Guardians, an ode on the suicide of her college friend and Platonic companion, Harris. Hospitalized three times for bizarre behaviors and depression, Harris was given antipsychotic drugs. It’s theorized that one side effect of those drugs is the rare akathisia, a kind of psychotic restlessness, which intensifies any driven behavior into mania. Escaping from a ward, the thirty-four-year-old wandered all day then leapt in front of a speeding train.

(San Diego Reader June 27, 2012)

Benito Cristobal is surveying the house he lost last year to a foreclosure defrauder, and he is emotional as he recalls the $30,000 worth of improvements he made to the home. The 51-year-old Mexican-American maintenance man, his son Efrem, a high school senior, silent by his side, steps slowly around what he once possessed, his gestures grand, his voice regretful. He says he got rid of the garden and laid concrete walkways. He covered the ground under the three lemon trees with redwood chips. He bought a new water heater, new windows, gutters. He built a patio with a roof, though he had to remove the roof and saw off the struts once the city discovered the unpermitted structure. He built a low cement-block wall, with a black wrought-iron fence atop, to surround the four 30-foot palms. For seven golden years, this three-bedroom, two-bath, two-car-garage abode was his and his family’s — at least on paper.

(Puerto del Sol Volume 47, No. 1: Summer, 2012)

1)

With the 2003 publication of Where I Was From, Joan Didion began what may be the final phase of her fifty-year-plus writing career—the first of three memoirs, a loose trilogy centering on geographical exile and personal loss that reveal a master composer of prose. Close behind Where I Was From came The Year of Magical Thinking in 2005. Then, at the end of 2011, Blue Nights. This decade-long memoir period caps a Leonard-Bernstein-like run with Didion scoring several hits among a host of genre, each of which overlaps. There's the novel phase: five books, published between 1963 and 1996, among them Play It As It Lays. There's the nonfiction phase: six books, several of which are essay collections, beginning in 1968 with Slouching Toward Bethlehem and ending with Political Fictions in 2001.

(Punchnels June 15, 2012)

One Maniacally Meandering Memoir

A few years ago, I wrote a book about memoir—not a how-to tract, but a what-happens-when an author writes one, its shocking self-discovery, its redemptive journey, akin to most events in life that change us significantly. I posited a term for a new kind of book that eschews a childhood trauma or mom and dad’s lousy parenting but embraces a just-lived drama: a divorce, a fizzled start-up business, a near-drowning in Lake Michigan. My term, “sudden memoir,” means to unpack a not-yet or nearly over relationship or event whose resolution may come about because you’re making a book about it. The mud of it is the point, especially since your subject is not past, and the book, one hopes, circumvents the mythologizing power, the authoritarian nostalgia of remembrance.

(Counterpunch May 25-27, 2012)

My Turn Under the Scalpel

Buy a newspaper and censor its content. This seems to be the policy of San Diego developer and multimillionaire Doug Manchester, who last November purchased the city’s largest newspaper and rechristened it, the UT-San Diego. His editor, Jeff Light has been cutting contributor’s voices left and right.Last Christmas, Manchester, a Catholic, published a front-page greeting, citing Jesus Christ as humankind’s biggest influence. When online readers reacted, many by discussing problems with Catholicism, Light didn’t like what he read, so he closed and erased the comments. In March, Light censored a week’s worth of Doonesbury’s cartoon strip, lampooning a Texas law that forces women to have ultrasounds prior to an abortion.

(Hippocampus Magazine May 2012)

Scrolling through Yahoo’s online finance page, I stumble on this purple headline: “A U.S. Debt Crisis Is On Its Way.” The article is by the British economist and Harvard professor, Niall Ferguson. I have not read his books but have savored his analysis in the New York Review of Books and in a few podcasts. (In early 2011, Ferguson was picked by Tina Brown for a weekly column in the new Newsweek.) He’s a smart guy. His view, like that of Paul Krugman, I trust, though I also admire the gloom of this article’s title—I’ve been looking for such negativity of late to help me rationalize why I’m trying to get out of the stock market: post-bailout, mid-recession, pre-crisis, wherever-we-are.

I click on the link and up pops three short paragraphs, nestled in the middle of a page surrounded by marauding ads, typographically foxy: “Buffet’s Latest Pick.” “Buzz.” “Our Premium Membership.” To the left of the graphs and the graphics is a headshot of Ferguson, which suggests a video, perhaps of the same material, repackaged into a live or recorded interview.

(Richard Gilbert's Blog March 27, 2012)

In a recent New York Times essay, “Your Brain on Fiction,” Annie Murphy Paul argues that “Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica” to “construct a map of other people’s intentions.” Research suggests that “individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.”

Narratives make us better people. I’m open to that. I do agree reading fiction is a pleasure as well as socially instructive. And, it seems, neuroscience confirms it. But why only study novel-reading and then moralize it, like eating your spinach, into preferential behavior?