Christina ~ May 25

 

I’ve kind of flogged my childhood to death, at least it sometimes seems that I have. Decades in psychotherapy of course, years of writing about it, resulting in a pretty polished memoir of my first 20 odd years, polished yes and also very short for a memoir, only about 47,000 words. It was a good deal longer at one point but I took it apart, broke it into what I called “fragments,” knowing that my best writing, my forte so to speak, was the short piece, so I broke it into fragments and then put it back together again, not worrying if the fragments had transitions, in fact, making sure each piece worked as a stand alone, which is what most of them were originally written to be. When Alice Munro died recently I read an article about her, about her choice to stick to short stories rather than try to write a novel, and she said something in one of her interviews that I really understood, that she had: 

 

. . . on occasion . . . experimented with stretching her stories into novels but said she found that the stories “start to sag” when she did so, as though being taken beyond their natural limits. 

 

And that’s how I always feel when I try to write something long, that the story sags, is taken beyond its natural limit. Of course, Alice Munro’s short stories are very long, even for short stories (I looked it up, someone has taken the time to get the average word count of an Alice Munro short story and it’s 10,000 words!). And of course its pretty presumptuous to compare myself to a writer as wonderful as Alice Munro even if I’m only talking about her choice of writing format, but still, I understand what she means.