Talking River Review faculty advisor Jennifer Anderson recently had the opportunity to review Flynn’s new memoir and ask him some questions about his work.

Writers have long explored the notion of home, but seldom do we encounter a writer so willing to consider one’s impulse to destroy it. Poet, memoirist, and playwright Nick Flynn addresses this compulsion twofold in his latest memoir, This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, published in 2020. When he was six, his mother set fire to their house, an incident as mysterious as it was traumatic: 

In one version of the night our house caught fire I’m carried outside in my pajamas. […] In another version my mother shakes me awake with a word, and the word is RUN. Or maybe she simply yells from the bottom of the stairs. Or maybe she doesn’t say a word, maybe the house is silent, maybe it’s the smoke that wakes me. 

In my mother’s version it was raccoons that started the fire. […] For years this was the story because it was a story that had an ending, even if it ended in flames. As a story it was, at least, comprehensible. (62-63)

Flynn’s mother committed suicide when he was twenty-two, and the truth about her actions that night will never have definitive answers. Even so, Flynn tries to understand that past as he confronts his own destructive tendencies by seamlessly weaving the narrative of his childhood with one from his adult life, wherein he engages in a years-long extramarital affair. While the match he strikes is metaphorical, its flame is no less painful or damaging to the home he shares with his wife and young daughter, as he writes, “Everything, it seemed, was ending—my marriage, my job, my home. Yet nothing ever ended—my childhood, the fire, bewilderment” (179). 

While This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire delves into the complex motivations for destroying that which ideally shelters us, keeping us safe and feeling loved, that’s only one element of the story. Flynn’s memoir is largely a work about creation, about building—or rebuilding—the foundations of home. He accomplishes this, in part, through the stories he tells his daughter. Flynn makes clear from the start that he wants his daughter to know who she is and from where she originates. In the first chapter, “Ice Age,” he writes, “Now my job as a father (or one of them) is to tell my daughter stories from when I was her age. […] So one day she will understand where she is from, what made her. […] I’m trying to make it easy for my daughter, something my mother never did for me” (4). Rather than remaining an enigma to his daughter by allowing her to someday grapple with the same mysteries that have shadowed him throughout his life, he is unsparingly open in his examination of both the past and present. This fact is made unmistakably clear at the end of the memoir when Flynn directly addresses his daughter: 

Love, if you are reading this now, please know I tried. […] You were too young, then you weren’t. I wanted you to know where you came from, to wade up to your knees in saltwater. To never turn your back on a wave. I wanted you to know where your father came from. […] Child, believe this: a chicken can spell anything by what she leaves untouched—nothing can be hidden from her. The story we tell about our childhoods, even the story you are telling now, as you are in the midst of it, each word is so much debris in the saltmarsh, being slowly swallowed into what we will end up calling LIFE. (267)

Even as he admits we inhabit a universe “made up of 70 percent dark energy, 30 percent dark matter, [with] less than 1 percent of what we think of as us” (30), a universe where nearly everything is unknown, Flynn has created a lyrically personal blueprint for his daughter to follow when navigating her own life.

Perhaps even more, and regardless of our individual experiences, Flynn’s memoir reminds us all that to understand who we are, we must first understand where we come from. It’s important that we atone for our mistakes, own them, and learn from them. As Faulkner recognized, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

Interview with Nick Flynn

Jennifer Anderson: The title, This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire, immediately clues readers in on the importance of “home” in your memoir. Early on, in the chapter called “Synecdoche,” you say that “Today, before the house is awake (I am using ‘the house’ as a synecdoche), I was listening to the radio. A man was talking of the Talmud, how each word in it contains the whole, how it reveals the interconnectedness of all things” (32). Does the idea of “home” (or even “fire”) serve as a synecdoche for the entire book? And can you also talk about the idea of interconnectedness threaded throughout the narrative? 

Nick Flynn: Nice question … that chapter, “Synecdoche,” comes from the Charlie Kaufman film (which I love), which also has a thread running through it of a burning house, or more accurately a smoldering house. That concept, of the interconnectedness of all things, runs through many spiritual traditions, and even into the realm of quantum physics. How the smallest piece of something contains the energy of the whole … I tried to capture some of that energy in the book. Is fire or home a synecdoche for the entire book? One cancels out the other, right?     

JA:  I’ve long admired your poetry and prose. Some passages of This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire read like poems. How does your poetry inform your creative nonfiction?  For instance, the chapter “Run” is even structured poetically: 

Run, my mother says, shaking me awake. 

Only a voice inside my dream, but the dream’s already 
sinking. 

Breathe through this, she says, reaching into the dark water, 
pressing a wet cloth over my mouth. 

I don’t know which is thicker—the dark, the smoke, 
or the voice in my head. We have to get out, now.  

I still can’t see, but I run. 

I remember tumbling down the stairs into the thicker 
smoke. 

I remember my body, how it knows not to breathe. (59) 

NF: I did slip a few passages in the book that conform more closely to what we think of as poetry, in that I paid attention to the line breaks in each sentence … it was a way to let out a different type of energy. I think they might slip past many folks, just shimmer a little differently.

JA: It seems that structurally This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire functions similarly to your other works of creative nonfiction—I’m thinking specifically of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Although both are cohesive memoirs with clear narrative arcs, they’re written in such a way that a reader could hypothetically read singular sections in any order (which I’ve done), and these sections could stand alone and still resonate, sort of like individual flash essays. Can you talk about your process for writing a long memoir?  

NF: Nice to think of you dipping into the books, creating your own adventure with them. Nice to think they could be read in multiple ways, that each chapter can stand on its own. It’s like poetry in that way, where each line has its own integrity. Though with the memoirs, I think reading from beginning to end will allow the repeated images (some call them motifs) to build in meaning from when you first encounter them. But if you read about the fire from the last section of the book, it might be like running a film backwards, which would have its own thrill.   

JA: Along these same lines, there are elements of experimentation woven throughout the book, perhaps the most obvious on (the unnumbered) pages 222-223, which remain blank save for the repetition of “home” at the bottom. Can you talk about the value of experimentation and how these passages serve the larger narrative? 

NF: I wanted those pages in the book, with the word home repeated along the bottom … it felt like a more accurate way to capture my inner experience at that moment in the book … almost as if the word “home,” or the idea of a home, or my actual home, the place I live, was what was at stake at that moment in the book, reduced to a flat line with a lot of sky above it. I think writing is by its nature experimental—it is such a strange practice, to make marks on a page, that corresponds to a sound in the world, that creates images in stranger’s heads. We forget sometimes how strange the act of writing is. Any time you can pull back that curtain can wake us up a little.  
 

JA: In the early pages of your book, you note the importance of telling your daughter stories so that “one day she will understand where she is from, what made her.” You also state that “I’m trying to make it easy for my daughter, something my mother never did for me” (4). How can stories help make things easier for us? 

NF: I don’t believe there’s just one thing that stories do for us … some can help us through rough patches, some can blind us to reality, some can be used to justify terrible things. I was talking about lifting the veil for my daughter on what I was like as a child, on what my hometown was like, which is where she is from, at least half of her. Yes, it was something my mother never did for me, to really let me know what her childhood was like. I think it would have helped me, even if the stories were made up, to understand her better. Maybe it would have helped her as well, to tell them.     

JA: The idea of truth features prominently in your book—the truth about the fire, the truth about the affair, to name two moments. How, as writers of creative nonfiction, do we find truth, especially when grappling with so many uncertainties and different versions of the same stories?  

NF: Truth—humbling thing to be in the face of it. We can try to get as close to it as we can, always knowing that there is a whole world just beyond the curtain that will forever remain a mystery. The truths in my book cover that spectrum, from what is clearly knowable (the affair) to what is forever unknowable (did my mother set our house on fire? If so, why?). Both, for this book, were extremely hard to wrestle with … coming clean about the affair did, somehow, open me up to looking into the fire. Yet even as I write that I doubt myself—the affair is knowable as an act in time and space, but the deeper truths of it are way more complicated.    

JA: Finally, I deeply respect the honesty with which you write and how you don’t hold back, for instance, when writing about your affair—an intimate, difficult subject that opens you up for judgment from others. What advice would you offer emerging writers of creative nonfiction about sharing these types of stories? 

NF: Early on I convince myself that no one will ever read what I write, which is very freeing. If I thought about my readers, I might not write anything. A young woman once admitted to me that she read a few pages of my first memoir, and threw the book across the room, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to take my homeless father into my home. A few years later this woman’s father, sadly, became homeless, and she returned to the book, and looked me up, and we were able to work together. I was grateful she told me about how she had judged me, grateful the book could be of some help when it was her turn. Nowadays, I am not that concerned with being judged—unless I have done something to you personally, something I clearly need to make amends to you for, I figure your judgement is something you need to wrestle with on your own. I don’t know most of my readers, I would simply hope they would bring themselves to the books and have their own experience.   

Talking River Review faculty advisor Jennifer Anderson recently had the opportunity to review Gutkind’s memoir and ask him some questions about his book, his writing process, and how he’s faring during the pandemic.

I was introduced to the work of Lee Gutkind, founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, twenty years ago as an undergraduate studying creative writing at Lewis-Clark State College, a small liberal arts college in Idaho where I now regularly teach his books to my own students. In addition to being regarded as “the Godfather” of creative nonfiction, Gutkind has been a well-known practitioner of immersion journalism for nearly five decades, a subgenre of nonfiction where, as he says, he “mine[s] the mysteries of other people’s lives” (102). When I learned that he had recently turned his focus inward by “immersing [him]self in [him]self” (103) and had written a memoir—his first ever—I was eager to read it. 

As the title suggests, My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Male in His Seventies is, on the surface, a first-hand look at aging. The memoir opens on the morning of Gutkind’s seventieth birthday and immediately dives into his conflicted mindset about growing older. He writes,

Seventy, I had repeated to myself, was only a marker. An unremarkable marker. 

This, of course, was a goddamn lie. A sham. A way of steadying myself and keeping calm. Or keeping going, even though things weren’t going too well for me back then, to say the least. The stuff of my life—what had, in fact, kept me going—seemed to be gradually falling apart. (2)

Gutkind then chronicles some of his losses attendant to growing old, for instance, his health (he has trouble with eye floaters, his prostate, and sciatica) and short-term memory (he habitually forgets he is boiling eggs until he hears them explode on the stove). He reflects on the demise of several important relationships—the recent death of his mother and two close friends—as well as the uncertainty of his professional goals after his publisher cancels his book contract, a work about Menachem Youlus, the Torah Hunter, which Gutkind had hoped would be “the crowning glory of [his] career” (194). His honesty, as he works through these problems on the page, is refreshing. Not once does he dilute his disappointments, embarrassments, and anxieties:

I wanted to figure out who I was, who I had become, how my seventy years had been invested, why I did what I did—and why I did not do, perhaps, in retrospect, what I should have done. […] Like why was I, or why did I feel, so isolated and alone when, maybe, surely, there were people in my hometown and elsewhere who might want to interact with me? Why did I feel so vulnerable? (12)

As the best memoirs do, My Last Eight Thousand Days attempts to answer these questions by closely examining the past as well as the present. Seamlessly, in a manner analogous to how memory itself works—one moment triggering a recollection of another—Gutkind recreates scenes from his past to inform his current situation. We learn about his boyhood insecurities while in school and his tenuous relationship with his father; his stint in the Coast Guard and his perseverance in finally passing the rope test; his visits to his psychiatrist, his failed marriage, and his early writing career. Ultimately, Gutkind gives us an intimate and holistic look at his successes, his failures, and his vulnerabilities, so that we understand how his past has shaped him into the septuagenarian he is now. 

But, if we presume that with all of its heavy subject matter, My Last Eight Thousand Days is solely a dark account of one man’s experience with aging and loss, then we are mistaken. Gutkind’s book is funny and often reveals an amusing, self-deprecating awareness. In one passage, he admits that his personal struggles with aging are not new when he recounts how he fled the expensive restaurant where his ex-wife had planned his fortieth birthday celebration: “The next thing I remember is lying in bed, blankets to my chin, eating from a box of soda crackers, sucking on the salt, drinking a Diet Pepsi, and watching M*A*S*H on TV” (7). In another, when confessing that he talks to himself out loud on the street, something that happens more frequently as he ages, he infuses his language with candid, energetic comedy: 

The sound of my voice, carrying both sides of the conversation, eventually startles me, and I say, also out loud, “Oh shit. You better stop this.” And I do—until I begin to think of something else that’s on my mind, and my resolve to shut up fades, and the dialogue in my head gradually flows out of my mouth and into the street. And again, I have to shut myself up—“Stop talking!” I command—and again, for God’s sake, out loud. (18)

This frank, humorous tone continues throughout the entire memoir, softening even the hardest of truths by tapping into those human idiosyncrasies that we all, in one way or another, share. 

It is worth noting, especially given the COVID-19-era in which we now live, that My Last Eight Thousand Days is more than solely a memoir about aging; it’s also a memoir about the importance of human connection, something that everyone, regardless of age, can relate to. At one point, Gutkind has an epiphany about his increasing sense of isolation. He writes, “[O]n my own, between books and immersions, I was tired of being a lone wolf, a guy so obsessed with work and climbing the goddamn flagpole of achievement that I had lost touch with other aspects of life” (232). So, he has what he calls an “attitude adjustment” (225) and starts reaching out to people, whether they be strangers on the street or the regulars at Starbucks, which helps him foster relationships and also develop a newfound sense of contentment, what he calls “the new, albeit older, me. A guy with friends, a guy with options” (254). It’s likely that Gutkind finished writing his book before the pandemic, but his message about the value of human connection proves especially resonant in a time where so many of us remain separated from others. 

Though My Last Eight Thousand Days opens by detailing what Gutkind has lost in his seventieth year, it ends on a note of hope about all that he has gained. By immersing himself in his own life and mining the mysteries of himself, he has effectively uncovered many of the mysteries of the human experience inherent to us all.

Interview with Lee Gutkind

Jennifer Anderson: I want to begin by asking how you are doing during the pandemic, when all of us, to a degree, are experiencing an increased sense of isolation and disconnect.

Lee Gutkind: For one thing, I’m quite used to being alone, so it hasn’t made a gigantic difference. My whole life, I’ve been pounding away at some sort of keyboard and not answering phones or doorbells and ignoring friends who reach out because they want to just say “hi,” or have lunch or something. So, it’s not affecting me as much as it might affect other people who are generally more social than I am.

 And secondly, if you read the second, transitional part of my book, you’ll see that over the past four or five years I have carved out a new life. So those folks are still there, like the happy hour Fridays we would spend at this place called Casbah. We’re now Zooming every Friday at five o’clock. We have our own happy hour. Now, to be honest, I don’t like it—I love bars; when you’re in a bar, you squeeze together, you climb on everybody’s shoulders, and then you have the side conversations, like your good friend comes in, and he’s got a dumb hat on, or whatever it is, and you say, “oh, that hat.”  So, that’s all gone. But I’ve been okay because I know that even my new friends are okay in this same way.  

JA: In this book, you are incredibly honest and even vulnerable as you contemplate your public and private personas and the current shape of your life. Can you talk about what it’s like to do this in your seventies, and even more importantly, in a public arena?

LG:  Well, it’s my first memoir, and I wanted to do it right. I didn’t want to leave anything out that I thought was really important. Just as I do deep dives into other people’s lives, it would only be right, fair, and smart to take the deepest dive possible into my own life, and it is a lot easier to do it when you’re seventy rather than when you’re thirty-two. Honestly, as a famous person once said, what do you have to lose? What I had to lose was not doing it right. What I had to lose was here I was, the big deal godfather, not doing memoir the right way. Considering that I may have less than eight-thousand days to live, and this may be my last book—I mean, who the heck knows?—I wanted to dig as deep as possible into who I am and why I am who I am, and I wanted to forget about being humiliated, because you can’t humiliate me anymore. 

Also, since I have taught literally thousands of students how to write memoir, and I have edited so many memoir-oriented essays, I had to do it right. Since this could be my last chance at doing this, there was a lot I had to learn. A lot of the things that you do as an immersion journalist or reporter are different. There are lines based upon how much information people will give you about themselves and also what you can daringly intuit. So, I just decided, I’m going to go all out. It wasn’t easy, and it took a long time. It’s like seeing a shrink, in many respects. You go in to see a shrink, you tell your therapist a story, and he or she nods and gives you signals. But then you go back to the shrink the next time, and you tell that same story, but you get a little deeper, and it’s a little different. That’s the way the writing process was for me. I wrote the story. I thought about it. I read it. Sometimes I even read it aloud to hear my own voice. And then there were things I thought I should add, incidents that I remembered. Many of the stories I initially told focused a lot on blaming other people, but the more I thought about it, the more I began seeing that what happened to me was very much my own responsibility, so that helped me come to terms and just, I guess, confess. It was hard and long to do it, but I never held back because I would somehow be outing myself or hurting my own reputation in any way.

JA: Aldous Huxley once wrote that “The trouble with fiction […] is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”  In your book, you write how your nonfiction project about Menachem Youlus, the Torah Hunter, fell apart due to his deception. You say that you tried, unsuccessfully, to even write the story as fiction. Then, for a while, you say that you were unable to write at all so retreated into the world of fiction, specifically the TV show Law and Order.  Though often based on real-life events, each episode is shaped in a very predictable way. As a nonfiction writer, can you talk about the comfort that fiction gave you during that time, something that nonfiction perhaps couldn’t?  

LG: For a number of reasons, I didn’t read nonfiction during that time, and frankly I read a lot more fiction than I do nonfiction anyway, because for me, nonfiction is my work. Every time I look at a nonfiction book, I begin thinking of it as an editor or thinking as a writer, figuring out what I can learn from that person, whereas reading fiction turns out to be much more of a pleasure. Now, it isn’t the case that I’m not reading any nonfiction. During that time, I read a couple of Erik Larson books. He has the ability to make the information so intriguing that it takes you away; you’re brought into Churchill’s house and his life and his family. But mostly, I read fiction. 

And now for the second part of your question, Menachem was unpredictable in how he behaved toward me and what he did to me and to a lot of other people. I was not the only victim; the real victims, actually, were the people that he fooled into thinking he was giving them the Torahs the Nazis stole from their families. I didn’t want any more shoes to drop. I wanted to see a story. I wanted to connect with the characters and hope that those characters would do what I expected them to do and watch the entire sixty minutes play out. It was very comforting for me. 

I was never so lost. Menachem made me think I could turn back again to be Jewish. Out of seventeen books, this was the first auction one of my books ever had, the first time a lot of people were jumping all over it—the hero Torah hunter rabbi—and I was pretty blinded. It isn’t that I didn’t suspect that there were things going wrong. But frankly, I thought that whatever went wrong would be part of the story. When he was uncovered as a fake, I wasn’t stunned at all. What stunned me was that my publisher cancelled my contract. I thought, well, this is a better story; he fooled people for twenty years, and now he’s been outed. This is so interesting. What’s going to happen next? Nobody found it interesting, except me and my friends, so all of that just shook me up. I mean, here I am, the great storyteller, the founder of Creative Nonfiction journal, and I got from flimflammed because I was so taken in by the potential of his story.

JA: Do you think you will ever return to the Menachem project, perhaps with a new angle? 

LG: As I said in my book, trying to figure out how to re-spin that story occupied a lot of time and effort in my life and wore me out. It made me depressed and crazy, and so my compromise was that I spread it out as long as I could in My Last Eight Thousand Days; there are at least four chapters, I think, that focus on him. But there isn’t a week when I don’t think of Menachem and what has happened to him, how I allowed myself to be fooled because of my desire to write the greatest book ever, and because of my absolute lust for the best true stories. So, to answer your question, maybe. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to do it, and maybe he won’t be the main character, but he may well be the inspiration. It was so good to walk away from it that I don’t know if I want to walk back in and go back to my notes and look at it all over again. 

JA: I admire how you weave humor throughout your book. What is the value of integrating humor into creative nonfiction narratives, especially when juxtaposed against heavy subjects like the ones your memoir addresses?

LG: Writing a depressing book is pretty much a guarantee that you will have very few readers.  Maybe they’ll start it with you, but sooner or later, there must be a way for your readers to connect with the characters and connect with the story and enjoy it. Getting old is a bummer, but if you approach it differently, it can be humorous, especially if you’re willing to make fun of yourself. When you make fun of yourself, you show that you are a human being. I’ve been watching TV lately, and Barack Obama is not only criticizing Donald Trump and the Republicans, but he also makes fun of himself from time to time. That’s one of the lovable things about him. You know that you’re getting the straight stuff. It’s not just the words, but how he views life about himself and others.

 I did this book once called Stuck in Time about child mental illness. I immersed myself for many years, and I spent a lot of time with the parents of a girl who was bi-polar. The parents were upper middle class, well educated, the father was a big deal in a large corporation, and they couldn’t control their daughter, no matter how much money they spent. They just couldn’t. They agreed to let me observe and take notes during therapy sessions, both with their daughter and with their social worker. But the thing that struck me was, it was so awful for those parents, and they would say such terrible, depressing, deadly things about how they felt about themselves, and then they would start to laugh. They would look at each other and say, “Ah, what else can we do but laugh!” What a great relief. I remember how they were able to tell the saddest story ever about their daughter and what they had to accept, and how they dealt with it with humor.

It makes us real. I mean, here we are in this COVID crisis of seven or eight months and everybody’s joking around all the time about masks. What else is there to do but kind of have some fun with it? It helps us all get by a little bit more easily. One of the things about my book that I really like, in addition to being honest, is that people tell me that that they laugh, and thank God they laugh, because there are not a ton of laughs these days, and it’ll get them to another chapter.

JA: After all of your “self-immersion,” do you have any advice for readers—maybe not just as a writer, but on a personal level—as to how we should live?

LG: I wouldn’t necessarily say I have any advice for anyone, but I have learned that you have to get over yourself and start to think about what it is you want for how many days or years you have left and try to achieve whatever that goal is. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you have trustworthy people, friends and family, to reach out to. 

I’ve learned that it doesn’t take too much at all. Right before you and I started talking, I was sitting in the office on Walnut Street with John, a guy that I have known on Walnut Street for at least thirty years. I never knew anything about him at all until one day, I don’t know, three weeks ago when he read my book, or he heard something about my book, and we started talking. He’s a terrific and interesting guy. Thirty years, and I never made any effort at all to connect with him. Last week, we went out and drank some wine outside, and we met the owner of the restaurant—I began talking to him just for the hell of it, you know, just reaching out—and we had the greatest conversation, the three of us, one of the best conversations I’ve had in years. I learned so much about this older Italian guy who started the restaurant and so much about my new friend John.

My life has changed so much by making the effort to reach out to other people and believe that they have something to share or say that I would be interested in. I always knew that everybody has something to share or say, but I was never open or interested. So that’s my lesson: COVID or not, mask or not, hiding in my house or not, I’m having a better life than I ever had before. It’s nice to have a few friends around, especially when you get older and the main activity—I’m not a funeral guy—but the main activity of many people your age is going to funerals.

JA: What do you think of the current state of creative nonfiction and where do you see it going, especially in this “post-truth” era in which we now live?

LG: I have been trying, frankly, to figure that out. I don’t think we quite know where things are going in this genre until it finally gets here. There are a lot of people pushing the boundaries of nonfiction in different ways that were hardly ever done before. Today, I just got an email from someone who is trying to understand what a braided narrative is. Okay, now maybe we were braiding twenty years ago, but we weren’t discussing braiding at that particular time. And then there is this battle to figure out how we can stretch the idea of the bonds of truth, and lots of people are musing about that. There are also people who don’t really care what’s true, still calling it creative nonfiction, perfectly happy for the sake of their own writing and their own feelings about literature to lie to their readers without a blink of the eye. And then there’s the recent really interesting stuff about alternative facts and fake news. It’s all going to come together at some point, and there will be a new way to describe and capture what creative nonfiction is. 

Creative nonfiction, I would say, is supposed to be a balanced synchronization between story and information, style and substance. That’s the way I’ve always taught it. I’m guessing that that as time goes on, the style aspect will overwhelm the substance aspect, and that worries me a lot—not because style and story aren’t important; they are really important—but the real reason they are important is so that they will make the substance compelling and add clarity to it. I’m afraid that that part of those two words, “creative” and “nonfiction,” will partially fade away. We’re going to have to figure out how to deal with it; a lot will have to do with the writer’s voice and how credible we can be no matter what we say to our reader.

JA: Finally, do you have anything else that you would like to add about your book or about the process of creative nonfiction?

LG: Let’s just say that I never stopped working to write the best and most honest book that I have ever written. I don’t know if that’s true, but the ten years invested in it were really, in the end, quite fulfilling for me. 

For more information about Lee Gutkind’s memoir, My Last Eight Thousand Days, visit www.leegutkind.com

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All citations in this review are from Gutkind’s memoir, My Last Eight Thousand Days.

In her new book, In the Key of New York City: A Memoir in Essays, released on September 1, 2020,  Rebecca McClanahan recounts the decade that she and her husband lived in New York City. Not only are these essays individually rich in texture, they are expertly woven together to create a vibrant and resonant tapestry about that experience. Her book’s synopsis elaborates,

Rebecca McClanahan tracks the heartbeat of New York as only a stunned newcomer can: in overheard conversations on park benches, songs and cries sifted through apartment walls, and in encounters with street people dispensing unexpected wisdom. Having uprooted their settled lives in North Carolina to pursue a long-held dream of living in Manhattan, she and her husband struggle to find jobs, forge friendships, and create a home in a city of strangers. The 9/11 attacks and a serious cancer surgery complicate their story, merging the public with the private, the present with the past, to shape a journey richer than either could have imagined. 

Talking River Review faculty advisor Jennifer Anderson recently had the opportunity to ask McClanahan some questions about her book, her writing process, and how to find truth as a writer.

The following interview was conducted by email.

Jennifer Anderson: The book opens with “Signs and Wonders,” an essay in which you reflect upon your move to New York City and note, “Our lives are sublets anyway, and too quickly gone at that” (15). Why did you choose to begin with this particular piece? In what way does it introduce readers to some of the ideas that course throughout the book? 

Rebecca McClanahan: One of my earliest readers called this essay a “lyric panorama,” noting the musical threads that run through it. Her comment reinforced my instinct to place it at the beginning, since music (in various forms) plays an important part in the book. And opening the book in Central Park is a way to introduce the reader to the inimitable, mostly nameless characters who reappear, in different guises, in subsequent essays. The line you quote—about our lives being sublets—suggests another recurring element, the ephemeral nature of our lives, the knowledge that we cannot own our world. We merely sublet the world for a while and then, when our lease is up, release it. 

JA: One of the central themes of the book revolves around the idea of seeking connection. Can you talk more about this?

RM: In the past few years I’ve begun to realize that almost all my writing, in every genre and over nearly four decades, comes down to this question: Where do I leave off and others begin? It seems I’ve always been obsessed with the myriad ways in which lives connect and with the constant push and pull of relationships. This obsession plays itself out in numerous ways. In my nonfiction book The Tribal Knot, the relationships were ancestral. In my poetry and in In the Key of New York City, those relationships are sometimes transitory and anonymous, at other times long term and intimate. Most writers, I believe, continue to work and rework their elemental obsessions throughout most of their writing lives. My obsession just happens to be human connection.

JA: Even though the book comprises a series of essays, many which have been previously published in literary journals, it reads like a cohesive work, a memoir. What was your process in putting together the book? Did you have a memoir in mind when you began, or did that come later?

RM: Thank you, Jennifer. I’m glad that you feel the essays create a whole. That was my intent as I began to shape the book—once I felt that it could become a book, I mean. Each of the essays was written as a stand-alone piece, and since they were written over a long span of time—more than a decade—they represent different stages of my relationship with the New York years. As I mention in the Author Note, life interrupts the memoir and the memoir interrupts the life. So the process of shaping the book was at times a violent process, as it often is when I am taking independent essays and revising them to serve the larger book. (In my suite of essays, The Riddle Song and Other Rememberings, I went through a similar process.) For this new book, I interrogated every essay, asking it why it belonged and how it could be reshaped to deserve its place in the book. That meant, in some cases, cutting whole sections out of previously published essays, writing new sections, and even, at one point, cutting apart a segmented essay and sprinkling the segments into various parts of the book. I love revising and reshaping, I always have. It’s an exciting opportunity to see the work with new eyes. 

JA: The book contains both flash pieces as well as longer ones. For instance, “Eighth Avenue Moment” is just half a page long; it is sandwiched between two longer essays about 9/11. Can you talk about the connections between these short and long pieces, and how small moments can have as just as much impact as larger ones?

RM: Yes, I agree that sometimes it is the small moments that break our hearts. “Eighth Avenue Moment” (which was first published as a segment in a long essay) represents one of those moments. The street person I met on the street, holding the dying pigeon out to me, was connecting on a deep level. I ended up putting that brief piece between the two long 9/11 essays because it was such a small moment—of caring, dying, grief. I imagined it as the chance for the reader to bring her own experience of 9/11 to the page. In the book, I don’t address the attacks directly. The first 9/11 essay deals with the days leading up to the attacks and the second one deals with its aftermath. “Eighth Avenue Moment,” coming between the two, is what I see as a quiet, intimate space, a breathing space for the reader. All grief—even grief arising from a national horror like 9/11—is finally quite personal. I always trust the reader to supply her own emotion and to complete the transaction that we’ve begun together on the page.   

JA: In “Present Tense” you contemplate the notion of truth: 

“Getting at the truth,” we say, but why say it that way if truth is so obvious, so easy to uncover? Layer upon layer has grown over it. This has taken years. What is truth hiding from? And why is it so difficult to find its soft center? Sometimes to get at the truth, you must poke it with something sharp—a stick, a memory—until the stories spill out, each with its own lexicon. (91).

How, as writers, do we “get at the truth?” 

RM: Gosh, Jennifer, now I’m wondering myself. Maybe we really can’t ever get at the truth. Maybe it must get to us. (Your skill as a writer is evident in that great question!) Maybe, as I was saying in regards to the “Eighth Avenue Moment” question, it’s the small things that surprise us, that in some ways ambush us. In “Present Tense,” that small thing was the hand towel the narrator accidentally discovered while she was looking for something else, a small thing that called up an unwelcome memory, a truth that she had folded away. (I call myself narrator even though of course I was the one who found the towel! Such are the contortions memoirists find themselves in when discussing their work.) 

JA: In what ways does your work as a poet inform your creative nonfiction in this?

RM: One of my hobbies is memorizing poems, and I open almost every workshop—in nonfiction as well as fiction or poetry—by reciting a poem I admire. Especially in nonfiction workshops, I feel it is important to be reminded that literary nonfiction, including memoir, aspires to the condition of art. We aren’t simply transcribing experience. We are allowing language to shape the soundtrack of that experience. The sounds of individual words, the rhythm of sentences, the variation in pitch and pace—these elements are as important to the memoirist’s text as the events that happened.

JA: Since much of the book occurs prior to the emergence of social media and smart devices, I’m wondering what your thoughts are on these technologies and how they affect how we live and how we connect with others. 

RM: Oh my, I’m afraid I am not a big fan of so-called smart devices. I believe that people are pretty darned smart devices and I enjoy talking to them face to face rather than through a little screen, though of course sometimes that connection is better than nothing. One of the reasons I wanted to move to New York in the first place was so I could encounter a variety of people on the sidewalk, hear the broth of languages and sometimes, yes, even make eye contact! Of course often it drove me crazy—the noise, the crowds, the cacophony—but at least it felt more real, more connected, than the experience of driving on suburban streets, protected in my bubble of privacy. I’m glad that our years in New York were pre- cell phone, for the most part, and pre- social media. Social media, for me, happened on park benches, in theaters, in Grand Central, in the public library, on the subway, and on the street.

JA: Recently, there has been scrutiny of the Giuliani/Bloomberg eras of New York City. Is there a political aspect to your book?

RM: Perhaps there is, in small moments sprinkled throughout the book—for instance, in the post 9/11 park scene where I witnessed the Muslim woman running toward a child who was in trouble. Or in the encounter on the subway involving the two sleeping children. Or when I imagined what New York—or, indeed, our nation—might look like if we all, horror of horrors, went “back where we came from.”  I am a politically active citizen; I attend rallies, march in protests, and write letters to public officials and politicians. But in my literary nonfiction and my poetry, my political stances take other forms. Perhaps the stories, the images, the human encounters that I struggle to bring to the page could be seen as political. That is up to my readers to decide. Thank you, Jennifer, for the opportunity to think about these issues. 

McClanahan bio:

Rebecca McClanahan, author of ten books, has received two Pushcart Prizes, the Glasgow Award in nonfiction, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry magazine, and four fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her work has appeared in Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, the Georgia Review, the Kenyon Review, the Sun, and in anthologies published by Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, Norton, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Bedford/St. Martin’s, and numerous others. She teaches in the MFA programs of Queens University and Rainier Writing Workshop and lives with her husband, video producer Donald Devet, in Charlotte, North Carolina.