In today's Wall Street Journal Speakeasy, I'm talking about photographs in memoir.

Several weeks ago, I tore most of my memoirs off the shelf to research an idea I had about those who use photographs to amplify their memoirs. Dorothy Allison, Patti Smith, Michael Ondaatje, David Carr, Orhan Pamuk, Calvin Trillin—the list is long, and it made me happy to sit for a while and work the details out.

That essay runs today in the Wall Street Journal blog, Speakeasy. Many thanks to Beth Parker at Gotham for helping me find its right home.

This essay, on photographs, is part of a series of essays I've lately been writing about the memoir form. Today, in the The Millions, for example, I write about the conversational in memoir. Last week, I wrote in The Pennsylvania Gazette about the students I love.

Thank you, Beth Parker of Gotham, for finding a home for me at Speakeasy, and thank you Speakeasy.

More of my thoughts on the memoir form can be found on this dedicated Handling page.

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ISTANBUL/Orhan Pamuk: Reflections

Some memoirs wind you back through the crowded streets of the hero’s childhood.   

Some wend you through the neural pathways of the author’s craving, omnivorous mind.   

Istanbul, by the Nobel Prize winning Orhan Pamuk, does both.  Sebaldian in scope, suffused with gorgeous black-and-white photographs of historic Istanbul, this is an exploration of a city, a man, and a particularly rich, involving melancholic state known as hüzün.  “The hüzün of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry," writes Pamuk, "it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only a spiritual state but a state of mind that is ultimately as life-affirming as it is negating.”  

Istanbul sprawls like the city sprawls.  Its sentences can sometimes consume entire pages as they evoke landscapes and childhood rooms, gossip and history, painters and writers.  Pamuk takes readers on a journey—his journey—as a boy in love with his mother, as a teen in love with his city, and as a young man who ultimately chooses writing over painting.  Pamuk is tenderly and brilliantly tortured.  He is obsessed with ruins and all the loss, and beauty, that ruins imply:    

But what I am trying to describe now is not the melancholy of Istanbul but the hüzün in which we see ourselves reflected, the hüzün we absorb with pride and share as a community.  To feel this hüzün is to see the scenes, evoke the memories, in which the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of hüzün.  I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags.  Of the old Bosphorous ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance.... 

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to go beyond the limits of ourselves: the job of the novelist

To go beyond the limits of our selves, to perceive everyone and everything as a great whole, to identify with as many people as possible, to see as much as possible: in this way, the novelist comes to resemble those ancient Chinese painters who climbed mountain peaks in order to capture the poetry of vast landscapes.  — Orhan Pamuk, The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist

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new additions to my library

When my American Express bill came in this past month, something odd and spectacularly unprecedented occurred: I owed a mere ninety-nine cents.  True, I have been so holed up here, so focused on work, that I've been operating as a blinkered horse, my eyes on the finish line (s), my mind shutting out all purchase-able distractions.  Also true: Except when it comes to buying gifts (I buy many, many gifts) I have never been exactly profligate.  Malls drive me batty.  Excess crowds me in.  My decorating aesthetic is whatever lies between homey and uncluttered, warm and just enough.  My wardrobe features three pairs of jeans, some turtlenecks, some sweaters/coats, an occasional skirt, and some dresses, for when I have to wear dresses.  My mother used to buy me my most interesting, most meaningful clothes.  She passed away several years ago, and I never rose to the challenge.

(I do like shoes.  By my count, I have too many shoes.)

Still, what I do buy is books—I buy a lot of books—in support of an industry, in specific support of specific authors.  Thus, I rectified my no-buying spree yesterday by adding a number of titles to my personal library, all of them, I realize, falling into the nonfiction camp.  That's nonfiction the way I define it, and not the way John D'Agata wishes I would.  (For more on the D'Agata controversy, I suggest you read the Gideon Lewis-Kraus RIFF in the New York Times.) 

Among the titles that will (at one point) be reported on here are the following:

Rough Likeness: Essays (Lia Purpura)
Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Edwidge Danticat)
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, death, and hope in a Mumbai undercity (Katherine Boo)
Winter: Five Windows on the Season (Adam Gopnik)
House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Anthony Shadid)
Istanbul: Memories and the City (Orhan Pamuk)
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist (Orhan Pamuk)

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