Vivian Gornick, who always has interesting things to say about writing, has a piece in The Yale Review that argues that memoir and other forms of narrative are supplanting fiction. It’s a running theme for her. She says there are many reasons and gives two:
First, Modernism, the prevailing movement behind the novel, is fading. The prevailing theme is that of the individual being alienated from her culture. Many people just don’t see that in their own lives, she says.
Second, the Holocaust inspired countless voices to give testimony about what had happened to them, and the truth couldn’t be improved on with imagination. Gornick says all movements of liberation (of women, racial minorities, etc.) are similar: the nonfiction is as gripping as anything the imagination could create in a work of fiction. The women’s movement, she says, has produced many good memoirs and essays, but few good novels and plays.
If Gornick wrote a grocery list, I’d read it, expecting, somehow, to be provoked. I don’t read her because I agree with her.
In general, I prefer essays and memoirs to fiction. But I don’t connect that preference to world movements, catastrophic tragedies, historic events. My instinct tells me that personal preferences are about a person or personality.
• Source: Vivian Gornick, “The Power of Testimony,” The Yale Review, Dec. 1, 2021. If you’re interested in her views on writing, look for The Situation and the Story; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
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