Highbrow Magazine - biography https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/biography en James Atlas Shares His Own Life in ‘Shadow in the Garden’ https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/8589-james-atlas-shares-his-own-life-shadow-garden <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/books-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Books &amp; Fiction</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Sun, 10/15/2017 - 13:05</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1garden.jpg?itok=xli3IRgD"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1garden.jpg?itok=xli3IRgD" width="480" height="300" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p><strong>The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale</strong></p> <p><strong>By James Atlas</strong></p> <p><strong>Pantheon</strong></p> <p><strong>400 pages</strong></p> <p> </p> <p>To those of us ill-equipped for such an undertaking, biographers often seem like the unsung heroes of our “post-literary” age. The dedication they display, the tireless diligence with which they detail their subjects’ lives, the ways in which they seem to <em>inhabit </em>those lives—surely, these talents are beyond those of most of us mortals.</p> <p> </p> <p>James Atlas, the author of <em>Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet </em>and <em>Bellow: A Biography</em>, has written a sort of “summing-up” of his own life, large chunks of which he’s devoted to chronicling the lives of an obscure poet of the 1930s and Saul Bellow, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist of more recent times. His memoir, <em>The Shadow in the Garden</em>, is an often fascinating—and, at times, very personal—account of the nearly insurmountable tasks of completing an in-depth literary biography.</p> <p> </p> <p>Still in his mid-20s when he embarked on the Schwartz biography, Atlas recounts the excitement he felt when coming upon boxes of papers at Yale crucial to his pending project. “What was in these boxes—they could have been the junk of a college student moving out of his dorm—would determine the course of my life.”</p> <p> </p> <p>Perusing unpublished scraps and juvenilia is only a small part of the biographer’s task. To write a genuinely thorough life, one is obliged to closely read all the author’s collected works, as well as letters, diaries and drafts of manuscripts—not to mention visiting archives and tracking down family members and friends, professional colleagues, and anyone else with a glancing connection to the subject.</p> <p> </p> <p>Atlas details the tedious process of conducting interviews (sometimes with a neighbor or acquaintance) in the hopes of producing a single piece of material worth including in the published life. In fact, he contends, no detail is too small for potential inclusion:</p> <p><br /> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/1jamesatlas.jpg" style="height:352px; width:625px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>“Biographers take justifiable pride in pinning down the exact weather on a significant day in their subjects’ lives. One obvious motive for this ostentatious display of archival labor is to show  that the biographer has rummaged through almanacs, old newspapers, and nautical records with impressive, even irrational assiduity; but the case can also be made that these feats of meteorological research really do provide an atmospheric sense of what a particular moment in the time <em>felt like</em>.”</p> <p> </p> <p>Readers of literary biographies (or any type of biography) rarely get such an insight into the process itself—that “moment of contact, when you travel in a startling instant from the present to the past, your subject suddenly alive before you on the page, redeemed from oblivion.”</p> <p> </p> <p>At the same time, Atlas freely describes bouts of anguish and self-doubt inherent in the task at hand. Am I really the right person to write this book? What if I leave out something important? His honesty in these pages clarifies the emotional toll these multiyear (even decades-long) enterprises can take on a biographer’s own life. It’s a testimony to their obsessional nature, the determination not to let any scrap of the subject’s existence, no matter how small or inconsequential, go unexamined.</p> <p> </p> <p>It’s also the biographer’s curse to identify too strongly with his or her subject. After writing at length about Delmore Schwartz’s long (and eventually fatal) struggle with mental illness, Atlas himself was diagnosed with bipolarity. Unlike Schwartz, he benefited from the use of antidepressants, but nonetheless wondered if his obsession with biography was unhealthy:</p> <p> </p> <p>“Had I become Bellow’s Humboldt, ‘gray stout sick dusty,’ eating a pretzel in the street? No, though I had the beginnings of a belly and sometimes wolfed down a hot dog from a cart, ashamed of my mustard-stained fingers as I shuffled up West 77<sup>th</sup> Street. <em>Gray? </em>It was closer to chalk white. <em>Sick</em>? Yes, if you caught me on a bad day, my face drawn and pinched with worry … I identified with this character, both the one Bellow had brought to life and the one who had lived, in a primal way.”</p> <p> </p> <p><em>The Shadow in the Garden </em>is a unique, behind-the-scenes look at what Atlas himself sees as a potentially lost art. For future generations, there won’t be handwritten notes and letters for biographers to study, no “archive” in the traditional sense: “The only archive will be in the cloud.”</p> <p> </p> <p>This somewhat forlorn outlook serves as the underpinning for the book’s melancholy tone. Just as dead poets and novelists inevitably fade into obscurity, so too does the form which seeks to resurrect them. Nothing—not even the dogged determination of a gifted literary scholar—can stop the punitive march of time.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p> </p> <p><strong><em>Lee Polevoi, </em></strong><strong>Highbrow Magazine’s <em>chief book critic, has completed a new novel, </em>The Confessions of Gabriel Ash.</strong></p> <p> </p> <p><strong>For Highbrow Magazine</strong></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/james-atlas" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">james atlas</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/shadow-garden" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">shadow in the garden</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/biography" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">biography</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/saul-bellow" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">saul bellow</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/authors" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">authors</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-books" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">new books</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Lee Polevoi</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Google Images; Wikipedia Commons</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Sun, 15 Oct 2017 17:05:57 +0000 tara 7768 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/8589-james-atlas-shares-his-own-life-shadow-garden#comments Slouching Towards Joan Didion in Tracy Daugherty’s ‘Last Love Song’ https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/5603-slouching-towards-joan-didion-tracy-daugherty-s-last-love-song <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/books-fiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Books &amp; Fiction</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Sun, 02/07/2016 - 17:45</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1didion.jpg?itok=Cu91HHxs"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/1didion.jpg?itok=Cu91HHxs" width="480" height="373" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p> </p> <p><strong>The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion</strong></p> <p><strong>Tracy Daugherty</strong></p> <p><strong>St. Martin’s Press</strong></p> <p><strong>728 pages</strong></p> <p> </p> <p>It must be challenging to write a biography of a living figure, and doubly so when that individual has written so extensively about events in her life, traumatic and otherwise. Yet this is the challenge veteran literary biographer Tracy Daugherty has taken on. To his credit, he largely succeeds.</p> <p> </p> <p>Early on, Daugherty lays out a personal “manifesto” for approaching the life of Joan Didion:</p> <p> </p> <p>“When presented with the private correspondence, diaries, journals, or rough drafts of a writer, I remain skeptical of content, attentive instead to presentation. It is the construction of persona, even in private—the fears, curlicues, and desires in any recorded life—that offers insights … [Didion’s] work does not merely inform or misguide us about her; it enacts her on the page, reproducing her mental and emotional rhythms. Any serious work <em>about </em>her should seek to do the same.”</p> <p> </p> <p>Like Didion, he adds, “I have kept in mind the limits of narrative, but … I see no reason not to attempt what very well might end up in failure.”</p> <p> </p> <p>It’s just as well that Daugherty relies on a close reading of her work, since the writer and her close friends declined to cooperate with this venture. No one can say the biographer shied away from obstacles others might have considered insurmountable.</p> <p> </p> <p>Born and raised in California, Joan Didion has written at least one iconic novel, <em>Play It As It Lays, </em>and several groundbreaking works of nonfiction, including the essay collections, <em>Slouching Towards Bethlehem, </em>and <em>The White Album. </em>As definitive impressionistic works of the 1960s, they should endure well into the future.</p> <p> </p> <p>Probably Didion is best known for her late-career memoir, <em>The Year of Magical Thinking. </em>In this book (later adapted for, of all things, the Broadway stage), she recounts the harrowing experience of losing her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and their beloved adopted daughter, Quintana Roo, within the space of little more than a year.</p> <p> </p> <p><em>The Last Love Song </em>draws extensively on these and her other books to fill out the narrative. It might be argued that reading <em>The White Album </em>and other original works is a more “efficient” approach to understanding the arc of Didion’s eventful life. But Daugherty stakes a claim for a deeper understanding, at times consciously mimicking her unique style:</p> <p> </p> <p>“… I trust her literary methods will apply to <em>her </em>just as she pressed them on others—Joan Baez, Nancy Reagan, Dick Cheney, the ‘Joan Didion’ in her novels—revealing the bedrock beneath layers of myth, gossip, PR, self-promotion, cultural politics, competing notions of human nature and the purposes of biography.”</p> <p> </p> <p><br /> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/2didion.jpg" style="height:625px; width:409px" /></p> <p> </p> <p>At times, this approach seems to lead the author astray. While describing Didion’s father and his troubled emotional life, Daugherty digresses for several pages about Letterman General Hospital, where Frank Didion was treated in the early 1950s. It turns out a man named James Alexander Hamilton underwent medical training there, and would later pursue “mind-control experiments on human subjects using LSD, THC, and a long-acting atropine compound called BZ.”</p> <p> </p> <p>Even recognizing that to go too far down this particular path might “risk losing hold of our narrative,” Daugherty speculates on links involving the CIA, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, the emergence of the West Coast counterculture, and so on. Fortunately, he pulls back in time and for most of <em>The Last Love Song</em> avoids further such asides.</p> <p> </p> <p>He’s on surer ground describing Didion and her husband’s inadvertent prescience in relocating to Los Angeles from New York during the ‘60s, just in time for the end of the Haight-Ashbury era and the horrific Tate-LaBianca murders engineered by Charles Manson. Didion’s presence at this sordid cultural epicenter paved the way for her fiercely insightful essays and helped readers understand that, in fact, no genuine understanding of those chaotic times was really possible—a valuable lesson then and even more so now.</p> <p> </p> <p>Equally fascinating is his account of the Didion-Dunne marriage (and literary partnership), and the slow, unhappy decline of their health and fortunes. A great sadness hovers over the final pages of the biography, and is likely to compel readers to read <a name="_GoBack" id="_GoBack"></a>Didion’s own accounts in <em>Year of Magical Thinking </em>and its successor, <em>Blue Nights. </em></p> <p> </p> <p>For this alone, <em>The Last Love Song </em>should earn a place on her loyal readers’ bookshelves. </p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p> </p> <p><strong><em>Lee Polevoi, </em></strong><strong>Highbrow Magazine’s <em>chief book critic, is working on a new novel, </em>The Confessions of Gabriel Ash</strong>.</p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/joan-didion" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">joan didion</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/last-love-song" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">the last love song</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/tracy-daugherty" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">tracy daugherty</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-books" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">new books</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/nonfiction" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">nonfiction</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/biography" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">biography</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Lee Polevoi</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Google Images</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Sun, 07 Feb 2016 22:45:09 +0000 tara 6657 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/5603-slouching-towards-joan-didion-tracy-daugherty-s-last-love-song#comments All About Me: How Memoirs Became the Literature of Choice https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/1499-all-about-me-how-memoirs-became-literature-choice <div class="field field-name-field-cat field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/news-features" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">News &amp; Features</a></div></div></div><span class="submitted-by">Submitted by tara on Mon, 08/27/2012 - 16:33</span><div class="field field-name-field-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="og:image rdfs:seeAlso" resource="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/2mediummemoirs.jpg.jpg?itok=DSNaMMbQ"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/field/image/2mediummemoirs.jpg.jpg?itok=DSNaMMbQ" width="480" height="360" alt="" /></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>  </p> <p> Memoirs are the great equalizer of writing. In a genre utterly non-denominational, there is room for any story in any pattern of prose. The <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Books/2008/0509/p16s01-bogn.html">Christian Science Monitor</a> reports that memoirs have seen sales increase from $170 million to $270 million since 1999. Most nonfiction MFA writing programs are geared substantially towards the genre; Hunter College even requires prospective students to submit a memoir proposal as part of their application. Many bookstores can count their autobiography sections among the most frequented and their popularity thrives.</p> <p>  </p> <p> As the use of first-person continues to rise, so does its influence on other genres of writing. The landscape of fiction is changing to reflect a continuously growing fascination with the self, and authors are challenging the conventions of storytelling by inserting themselves where they hadn’t before.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Yann Martel’s <em>Beatrice and Virgil</em> was about a writer struggling to follow his wildly successful first novel with an experimental second, and though Martel is known for his stylized whimsy, it was clear that he was writing from experience rather than imagination. Sheila Heti’s recent novel <em>How Should A Person Be? </em>is a “novel from life” where the main character is also named Sheila, and she carries a tape recorder in an effort to capture empirical evidence of her identity.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Fiction has always dealt with questions of memory and selfhood, as has been its duty to readers and the world. But traditionally the fourth wall has stayed in place; only recently do those within the story look back and try to make eye contact. Or, perhaps, only now do publishers seem to get behind such blurry novels. Certainly small publishers have been the ones at the ready to champion experimental fiction. But the bigger publishing houses have also embraced works like these, partially because they have seen such a positive response to autobiographical spin.</p> <p>  </p> <p> A few years ago, <em>O, The Oprah Magazine</em> featured an article by Abigail Thomas that was <a href="http://www.oprah.com/omagazine/How-to-Write-Your-Memoir-by-Abigail-Thomas">a how-to on memoir writing</a>. It gave guidance to the aspiring writer on refining style, avoiding writer’s block, cultivating a tone and staying focused. “Writing memoir is a way to figure out who you used to be and how you got to be who you are…You will find there are many reasons to go look in the icebox or turn on the television, or reread <em>Middlemarch</em>. But pay attention to the little voice that whispers, ‘This part was interesting.’ Pay attention to everything.” Sound advice, but the article was largely geared to those who had never written, to those who do not know what they want to say—or how to say it—to those who are not necessarily setting out to effectively wrangle a slippery medium. Why then, why on earth, would a person set out to write an entire book?</p> <p>  </p> <p> Part of the appeal is that people who have published such books are considered to  have accomplished great things. Such a person can be said to have lived a full life; they have put a period on that long sentence. But all of that is a mere accolade of the deeper urgency to tell one’s story. It is so hard to make a meaningful life that if we try and then actually come close it becomes imperative to share in detail.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/1mediummemoirs.jpg" style="width: 514px; height: 600px; " /></p> <p>  </p> <p> Still more attractive is the freedom memoirs allow a writer to create metaphor from the “facts” of one’s life. Events can be revealed as reflection, with as much or as little embellishment as is necessary to express how something <em>feels</em>, rather than how it <em>is</em>. This is likely the formal difference between autobiography and memoir and is also undoubtedly a boon to the accessibility of the genre. There seems to be something missing from works considered purely autobiographical, something stiff or too linear about the prose that renders the subject far off in the distance, despite the insistence of a frequently deployed “I”. In a <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/2010/01/25/100125on_audio_mendelsohn">New Yorker podcast</a>, Daniel Mendelsohn describes autobiography as an oil painting to memoir’s watercolor (<a href="http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F40A12FD385913738DDDA90B94D1405B8985F0D3">here</a>, however, a reader of <em>The New York Times</em> articulately disagrees with this notion in an 1899 edition of the paper).</p> <p>  </p> <p> So inclusive is the form that there is an entire plane of the Internet dedicated to first-person language, the strange and wonderful Blogoshpere. What began as a live journaling experiment has become a breeding ground for unsolicited commentary, and there is often a publishing contingency surfing around, poised to administer book deals. Ever since the rampant success of <em>Julie and Julia</em> in 2005, blogs are routinely published in book form and often go on to sell relatively well. <a href="http://observer.com/2012/05/today-in-blog-to-book-deals-slice-harvester-memoir-texts-from-bennet-the-novel/">Kat Stoeffel’s recent <em>Observer</em> article</a> announces the publication of two new blog-to-book deals, in a tone that suggests they be added to the pile. All the time, a multitude of new posts are made daily, like bits of paper crammed into bottles and cast out to sea. Each one has an eagerness to be found. They may not be borne of the same mindfulness or be as delimited in structure as the memoir, but the compulsion behind them may very well be the same.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/3mediummemoirs%20%28barnes%20and%20noble%29.jpg" style="width: 348px; height: 527px; " /></p> <p> Saint Augustine chronicles the events leading to his spiritual conversion in <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/">Confessions</a>, the benchmark of personal literary expression. But the word <em>memoir</em> connotes a need for reconciliation with the past, or with memory, and these are the works that have flooded the market in the past 10 to 15 years. Frank McCourt, Jeanette Walls, Joan Didion, Augusten Burroughs and others have been memorable in the genre, and have cleared a path for many other writers to share and over-share, in both glorious and horrifying displays.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Books about traveling to remote places, beating cancer, the trials of cooking in restaurants, having an abortion, eating disorders, climbing K2, about leaving an oppressive country or religion or marriage, and of course, kabbalah. There are some memoirs that are intentionally uneventful. Sometimes there is a need for validation; sometimes a need to understand through rendering. Sometimes healing, sometimes catharsis.</p> <p>  </p> <p> When a memoir works, it can be a joy to read. Readers can discover that they identify with a person they have never met. It can put things in perspective for readers or satisfy a voyeuristic tendency.</p> <p>  </p> <p> But there are drawbacks to the form that can be a challenge to get past. For those who require that a work of nonfiction contain truth, it will be a tremendous turn-off to encounter dialogue in a memoir. A re-enacted conversation can have an insincere effect, to serve the author’s desire to come across in a certain way. For a reader, few things are worse than committing unsuccessfully to the stories of a charlatan. There is also the matter of secondary characters: people who are doomed to exist as an interpretation. They will never have a voice of their own; they will simply have to be held accountable for the author’s relationship with them, and hope that their flaws read as endearing.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Yet the greatest difficulty will be had by the authors, who must subject their most formative experiences to the constraints of language in the hope that words will not abscond with them.</p> <p>  </p> <p> Whether the end result is a work of literary distinction has little to do with memoir’s most appealing trait, which is that it is a unifying endeavor. The intrigue of first-person writing is it’s confessional quality —  the initial feeling that here is such an unusual situation that it had to be isolated from all others and put in book format —  and the subsequent realization that, actually, here is something that resonates. Perhaps a person needs to be able to see themselves, even if only in the smallest way, in order to engage with something.</p> <p>  </p> <p> When an event becomes memory, it can be called an experience. As we move through time, digesting the events that will shape our lives, we create stories that have to be imagined. These are what get written. These are the beautiful concessions of imperfect memory. If you try to take them all in, you will be smothered in an avalanche of minutiae. But then, at least, you’ll have something to write about.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <strong>Author Bio:</strong></p> <p> <em>Veronica Giannotta is a contributing writer at</em> Highbrow Magazine.</p> <p>  </p> <p> <em><strong>Photos: Peanuts cartoons; Barnes and Noble.</strong></em></p> </div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/memoirs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">memoirs</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">literature</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/biography" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">biography</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/bookstores" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">bookstores</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/authors" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">authors</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/yann-martel" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Yann Martel</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/sheila-heti" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Sheila Heti</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/oprah" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Oprah</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/middlemarch" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Middlemarch</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/writing" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">writing</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/new-yorker" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">the new yorker</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/daniel-mendohlson" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">daniel mendohlson</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/blogs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">blogs</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/joan-didion" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">joan didion</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/frank-mccourt" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">frank mccourt</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/augusten-borroughs" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">augusten borroughs</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Veronica Giannotta</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-pop field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Popular:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">not popular</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-photographer field-type-text field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Photographer:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Peanuts cartoon</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-bot field-type-list-boolean field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Bottom Slider:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Out Slider</div></div></div> Mon, 27 Aug 2012 20:33:36 +0000 tara 1466 at https://www.highbrowmagazine.com https://www.highbrowmagazine.com/1499-all-about-me-how-memoirs-became-literature-choice#comments