Hey Greenblasters!!
Boy, has a lot happened since the last time you heard from me:
It… really sucked.
But today, we’re not talking about ANY of that (you can read the LI posts above if you need to).
I just read Famesick, by Lena Dunham. I want to tell you about it, and explain WHY reading “creative nonfiction” is important for leaders, speakers, and anyone who wants others to give a shit about what they have to say.
What IS creative nonfiction?
Creative nonfiction (or “cree-non-fic”, as literally nobody calls it) refers to writing that deals with true stories from the authour’s life, but presented in a similar way to a novel: with a narrative arc, scenes, dialogue, etc.
I’ll give some recommendations of cree-non-fic* at the end of this newsletter, both memoirs and other forms.
*Coining it!
What’s a MEMOIR, though?
A memoir is not a novel. Novels are about made-up events.
And it’s not an autobiography. That’s an account of a WHOLE life, usually from someone famous.
“Memoir” can defy definition. In The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr, the closest she comes to defining it is:
(Memoirs are) held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past.
But… WHY read this stuff? Why not stick to shit like Atomic Habits or whatever?
When I opened Lena Dunham’s Famesick on a train in Norfolk, England last month, I’m not sure what I was expecting.
My sister had given it to my wife, who had no interest in it, so I took it as my backup vacation book. I had no real “relationship” to Lena Dunham - creator, director, and star of HBO’s Girls - other than a vague sense of “isn’t she really annoying, or something? Don’t a lot of people hate her?”
A lot of people do, in fact, HATE this woman, I found out.
I started reading in a brief moment of quiet on the train. Both my daughter and niece, normally squealing with delight and/or rage, were engrossed in an episode of Rupert Bear on a laptop. And I was hooked.
A very brief review of Famesick
Lena Dunham writes like someone who’s been in AA-style recovery. Because she has.
The main arc of her story is:
A girl, raised by artists to express herself but with weak-at-best parental boundaries (hello, MY childhood!), becomes WAY too famous, WAY too fast, and even though she was 23, I’ll say it: WAY too young.
This was me at 23. If someone had made this asshole famous… dear god.
Dunham doesn’t know how to handle the attention, or workload, or Twitter (who does?), and she gets sick, over and over. She gets prescribed opiates and benzodiazapines, and spends years trying to overcome her various physical and mental illnesses, addiction and a long-overdue hysterectomy just a couple of the endless, painful and frankly exhausting examples in the book.
Her “recovery”, if it can be called that, comes from her acceptance of the role she played in her own destruction, even if she writes negatively about some of the central figures in her story, her eventual commitment to sobriety, and moving to the UK to get away from the American celebrity scene.
My thoughts:
The prose itself is wonderful.
Sparse, fluid, and completely self-exposing, in ways even I found uncomfortable at times (and I’m a glutton for real shit).
She writes the kind of sentences I immediately wish I’d written, like:
“I wanted, I know now… to be so generous that I was above censure and so kind that I was above being subjected to anyone’s cruelty.
And:
“It’s easy to set fires in a life that seems like a simulation.”
The story itself, and the character it reveals, is a little less clear. I’m not sure how much to trust her version of events, although she makes a very decent attempt to acknowledge how difficult she must have been throughout.
However, the ultimate goal of the memoir, I think was served:
I feel like I understand her.
I feel like I know WHY she is the way that she is, even if that “way” is still kind of annoying. And I certainly don’t HATE her - not that I ever did. If anything, I feel, as Karr writes in Art of Memoir:
“(A) deep, mysterious sense of identification with the memoirist who has just confessed her past.”
THIS is why we tell our personal stories (and read memoirs to be better at it)
If you’ve read my stuff for a while, you know I tell corporate leaders, salespeople, marketers, entrepreneurs, and basically everyone who will listen to tell their 3-Act Origin Story when meeting someone new, or presenting to a new audience.
It’s to create that “deep mysterious identification” with our audience.
This is not so mysterious when you dig into the science of story, and you can recognize the feeling in yourself, when you hear someone bare their soul - with at least some skill and emotional stability - onstage, on a podcast, or in a book:
You see their humanity, and feel a sense of closeness and even kinship with them for sharing so vulnerably, and recognizing your own frailty and courage in theirs.
Reading memoir will make you better at telling your story.
From teaching you what is “ok” to share, and how to write the scenes of your life, to awakening your senses to the depths of invisible pain & misery that others go through, to make you more able to express yours in a way that will connect you to strangers, acquaintances and even old friends…
Memoir-reading makes us better storytellers.
Here’s a pic of my favourites. I hope you pick even one, and enjoy it as much as I have:
And here is my (shorter) list of related “creative non-fiction”:
(Cree-non-fic is never gonna happen, is it)
That’s it for now!! I’m so glad you opened this email, I’m going to be a lot more consistent from now on (barring future attacks on my family 🥲)
Please reply HUMAN to this email, if indeed you are, and let me know what other public speaking and storytelling topics you’re interested in reading about!
