Megan H. response: H. Malinowitz

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#560

I was engaged by Malinowitz’s opening memories about writing, beginning with her first aphoristic sentence describing the world’s reactions she’s observed in regards to people with “artistic pursuits,” let’s call them: “The world is much more enthusiastic about art than it is about artists.” There’s the simple reason that my early memories of writing are all encounters with people who found writing “vaguely strange,” at the very least, and a pursuit that shouldn’t see daylight or pragmatic company – there’s also her conversational but confessional tone and reflective structure.

I described her piece to a friend studying in an MFA fiction program as “modest without holding back.” I may have meant that the piece’s focus is always on the narrative itself: its cast of characters, its serendipity and strong sense of shifting settings to match the evolution of a relationship. This is opposed to emphasizing the author’s own characteristics, personality, and opinions, which can, other than celebrate an individual, create a limited point of view for the readers to stretch out in. As a result, I can believe, as a reader, that the Harriet on the page is not a caricature constructed to win favor with the reader but a true version of Harriet, a version which happens to live most fully in the context of this particular story.

I think creative nonfiction is most compelling when the author recognizes the limits of his/her individual lens of self and perspective and acknowledges outside perceptions of him/her – from Kerryn’s first unsettled impression of hearing the author’s real voice to the memory of Malinowitz’s feeling validated for her writing and observation skills for the first time by her classmates: “I was agreeably stunned to find that people really read their cards, with serious, rapt looks on their faces. Then they looked up at me with a combination of pleasure, surprise, bewilderment, and — most striking of all — curiosity. I, the unlikely custodian of such visions, was rewarded for the first time with the heady experience of being seen back.”)

I’m drawn to the spotlight turning to describe the writer’s perspective of the reader, as the classmates she’s describing are the precursors for her future readers, and we, her current witnesses of her success as a writer, are the re-casted players of this first exchange. Aside from reminding me of class discussions about how writing is a conversation/communication between writer and reader, an acknowledgement and appreciation of their mutual existences, I think it complements the piece’s overall traveling record, not just between different stages of life, continents and email addresses, but between the roles of writer and reader.

Lastly, I think her closing summation of her dual roles as both reader and writer fulfills the promise of her opening discussion about writing. While her young self struggled to know how the nearly “biological drive” to write could contribute to her “identity” and her life, the grown Harriet on the page declares a (sort of) answer in the form of a modern love story, “Out of narrative, I got Kerryn, out of Kerryn, I got narrative.”

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