64 of 66 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An ache, a longing, February 23, 2008
This review is from: Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir (Hardcover)
What I love about Natalie Goldberg's latest is how the book grows, how it swells, how it starts with small, private memories and joins these to the larger world. "The reason we want to write memoir," she says, "is an ache, a longing, a passing of time that we feel all too strongly." The longing calls up stories, calls up details, which are the anchor of any memoir. The details are vital, "but detail devoid of feeling is a marble rolling across a hard wood floor."
Memoir, says Goldberg, "is taking personal experience and turning it inside out. We surrender our most precious understanding, so others can feel what we felt and be enlarged." Our feelings connect us not just to the past, but to the rest of the sentient world, even the political world. We may lead a lucky life compared to others around the globe. We may write about a red wagon or "the slow spring we remember in Ohio, while at the same time atrocities, torture, genocide are happening. It's not wrong that our life has been graced, but it's important to acknowledge that while a rose blooms a bomb is being dropped."
Much of Goldberg's advice on writing we have read before, in her earlier books. But her suggestions here for putting the mind and heart in gear, as we put pen to paper, are perfectly fresh. More and more of us want to uncover and write down our own stories, and Old Friend from Far Away will be welcomed by anyone struggling to set down the sweet or painful pressure of her life, the past as it flows into the present. The book is filled with inventive observations, and with Natalie Goldberg's infectious belief in writing practice. "Stay connected to the power," she says, "the pleasure of writing. Come back to that over and over."
A lovely and trenchant book.
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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Juicy Treat, April 22, 2008
This review is from: Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir (Hardcover)
In Natalie Goldberg's new book, Old Friend from Far Away, the theme is in its subtitle: The Practice of Writing Memoir. Best known for her seminal book, Writing Down the Bones, Goldberg once again preaches the dogma of PRACTICE... Ten minutes of freehand writing on any topic. Just get it down.
This is not a book about how to put together a memoir, what topics to write about, or how to publish. Plenty of other memoir-writing books cover those topics. Goldberg is 100% cheerleader--reminding us over and over to "Shut Up and Write" because what we have to say is fleeting and so important. There are no great answers for who we are; don't wait for them. Pick up the pen and right now, in ten furious minutes, tell the story of your life. I'm not kidding. Ten minutes of continuous writing is much more expedient than ten years of musing and getting nowhere.
Natalie Goldberg is first and foremost a poet, so you can expect the pages to drip with delicious imagery. She is particularly adept at food analogies:
"Memoir gives you the ability to plop down like the puddle that forms and spreads from the shattering of a glass of milk on the kitchen floor."
"You crack open sentences, like egg shells letting the bright yellow, the clear white, in all its unorderliness, fall out."
The author advises us to jump in wherever we like; this is not a book to be read from front to back. In fact, she wants us to WRITE our way through the pages in whatever order we desire. And because life is not linear, you want to approach writing memoir sideways, using the deepest kind of thinking to sort through the layers. You want reflection to discover what the real connections are.
If you want to dive in and find exactly the inspiration you need, she provides advice in an index of phrases--a great place to start.
"Go for the jugular."
"Don't try to make it pretty."
"Trust your insides to lead you."
If you want to read some great memoirs, Goldberg provides a list of her favorites (and some of mine), including: Anne Lamott, Mary Karr, Maxine Hong Kingston. She features an eclectic mix of memoirists within her text from James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston to Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsburg.
If you are already an old friend of Goldberg, you will find comfort in her newest tome. If you are new to her work, you are in for a juicy treat.
by Karen Ryan
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
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39 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Rehashing old ideas, January 4, 2009
This review is from: Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir (Hardcover)
I love Natalie Goldberg, and Writing Down the Bones and Wild Mind are not to be missed, but this book was a real disappointment because all too often it was repeating ideas from those two classic works (things like "monkey mind" and approaches to writing fast without self-censorship). If you're looking for something new here, you aren't going to find much. I also think that Goldberg is long on inspirational writing prompts to uncover new ideas (write about a memory associated with cabbage or a bicycle, that kind of thing) but short on the follow through. This isn't about how to craft full memoirs.
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