ANOTHER EDITOR, A RIVAL OF MINE with a fondness for hypocrisy, once said there was nothing worse than a truthless writer, but I didn’t know any. I knew some whose writing had too much style and not enough story, but their lives were never like that. The writers I knew made their lives more interesting just by being writers—which is not the same as writing, but that divergence leads to nasty distinctions good writers never care about anyway. Let’s just acknowledge that writing is hard so it is okay to be a little tortured, and some writers are. It can all go very dark, but there is no sweeter validation than getting published for the first time. I sometimes reminded writers of that.
Good editors, like doctors, develop a bedside manner. My editing was full of questions— all the same question, really. What is the story? What’s the point of it? What do these sentences mean? Do they mean what you want them to mean? What if I told you they read like walk-ons in a Pirandello play?
To diagnose is an excellent verb for editors to keep in mind. But what are you trying to say? is not always an easy question, and the story isn’t always what the writer says it is. I thought often about what it was like to read the writers I knew best, how direct their prose seemed and how the work spoke for itself, yet that made them even more mysterious. It was that way with all of the writers whose work I loved.
Bibliomemoir is a word I never used, never wrote until this sentence. It was defined beautifully by Joyce Carol Oates as “a subspecies of literature combining criticism and biography with the intimate, confessional tone of autobiography.” Put another way, it is defining or giving meaning to a life through reading, and then writing about that reading. There is probably a seam between the reading and the living, but as an editor I could never find it.
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