[stylist] could anyone read this please?

Thu Apr 2 15:00:50 UTC 2015

Vejas,

The following quote should be a block quote:
the same language.  She says of her general experience as an immigrant: "I
understand the immigrant's seemingly perverse longing for a place called
home, a siren song that often precludes creating a happier life in new
surroundings.  The familiar voices, customs, and landscape set down in
infancy seem normal and right.  Whatever comes later, after language allows
us to shape our world, determines the course of our lives, but our emotions
are forever washed in these earliest impressions." (3).

Also, at end of quote, you need a comma instead of period with period at end
of citation. And what style are you suppose to use? MLA?

Beginning here, need paragraph break: Another thing to keep in mind about
this book is that the author was born in 1932

I disagree that writing a memoir decades after events have happened equates
to a writer not being able to accurately recall memories or that those
memories are not sharp. Unless she was diagnosed with a condition affecting
her ability to remember, I don't think people forget life events. Most
people writing memoirs write them years, decades after events have occurred.

You mention the author creating a third person account of her mother's past
as a teenager. While I have not read this book, many creative nonfiction
writers use this conceit when constructing memoirs and personal essays. It's
called conjecture and perfectly okay to do in this type of nonfiction
writing. Using different POV's, creating scenes, using dialogue, using
conjecture-- all this is acceptable in memoir writing. You may not care for
this, but playing and experimenting with structure, form and content is a
stylistic choice. I would be more analytical and address this in terms of
creative writing as opposed to a personal opinion about content.

In fact, I would focus more on analyzing the writing, address specifics
about voice, style, form, etc. instead of just saying what you liked and did
not like about the book based solely on subject matter, I. E. the author's
life.

Despite homosexuality being illegal during the Victorian era and not
acceptable at all, people did express homosexual desires, and some
point-blank lived openly as a homosexual. People may also have been vague
about being gay, but those close to them may have known or at least guessed.
If the author believed her best friend was gay, I'm not sure why you doubt
this. I've read lots of books from this era, fiction and nonfiction, that
address this issue. Maybe not always in blunt terms, but it is addressed, or
at least hinted at. Just like today, people tried to keep it hidden, but
often they expressed it in ways that were vague enough to make people doubt,
but it was expressed nonetheless.

Your writing is sound, but as I said, I would dig deeper into analyzing the
writing in conjunction with comments about subject matter. When reviewing,
you usually tread lightly when criticizing subject matter itself. Instead,
you tend to focus on style, voice, POV, structure, what worked and did not
work based in writing terms. To focus and criticize content is to basically
criticize the events of the memoirist's life. Basically, don't judge the
events but how the events are portrayed.

Bridgit

-----Original Message-----
From: stylist [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Vejas
Vasiliauskas via stylist
Sent: Wednesday, April 01, 2015 11:21 PM
To: stylist at nfbnet.org
Subject: [stylist] could anyone read this please?

Hi All,
I have to write a newspaper book review on the memoir that I read for
school.  I have almost two weeks to do it.  Because I didn't particularly
care for my book, I decided to write a negative review.  (And yes, despite
the fact that I enjoy using British spelling this review is strictly
American).  It seems like many newspaper reviews just rave about how
absolutely AMAZING a book is.  It doesn't matter to me that you haven't read
the book, I am just looking for structural suggesttions.  I am also more
than happy to clarify anything about what I have written.  What I have
written below is just a very rough draft from a book review beginner.
Thank you for all suggesttions.
Vejas
Immigrant by Sally Bennett
When I found out that I had to read a memoir, I decided that I wanted to
read one about someone from another country.  Learning about other cultures
has always been an interest of mine.  I was very excited to find that this
author was from England, because I have always been interested in everything
about the UK, such as its culture and its differences in language compared
with American English. 
The author, Sally Bennett, was born in 1932 in Yorkshire, England.  She then
moved to Spain at age 1 because  her mother had an affair with an American
man named Jack Pratt, who was living there at the time.  After a while they
moved to Portugal.  
While in Portugal, Sally gained a little sister, and her stepfather left the
family.  Sally, her mother and sister moved to Portugal, and then to Georgia
in the United States, then later back to Portugal, the UK and finally back
to the US, this time in Virginia, where she finished high school.  She has
been living in America ever since.
As one might assume, Sally's life was far from a party.  She only very
occasionally had a chance to see her father in England, and her relationship
with her mother, who was not the most maternal of women, was not helped by
the oblious cultural divide that came with growing up in two countries-even
ones with the same language.  She says of her general experience as an
immigrant: "I understand the immigrant's seemingly perverse longing for a
place called home, a siren song that often precludes creating a happier life
in new surroundings.  The familiar voices, customs, and landscape set down
in infancy seem normal and right.  Whatever comes later, after language
allows us to shape our world, determines the course of our lives, but our
emotions are forever washed in these earliest impressions." (3).
I do not know if I would recommend this book to anyone.  While Sally
Bennett's family history is interesting, the book lacks lots of cultural
detail, and the writing is a bit banal.  
However, the writer cannot be blamed completely for this.  While she
definitely could have focused more on the differences between growing up in
England versus growing up in America, she herself did not receive the most
culturally diverse experience.  Her life in England, limited to short breaks
with her father and a very small period living with her mother, did not give
her much time to really experience culture.  While she lived in Portugal for
a rather long time, her family always mingled with the English expat
community, and the book fails to mention anything about Portugese or Spanish
culture, which may have been something she never bothered to care about
while there.  Another thing to keep in mind about this book is that the
author was born in 1932 and the book was just published in 2013.  While the
mind of an 81-year-old can still be sharp, she will not have the vivid
memories that she would still have had in her twenties and thirties.
Another aspect of the book that really did not sit well with me is that
there are two chapters in which Sally's mother, Sylvia, is portrayed in the
third-person narrative as a teenage girl.  
While I have a great relationship with my parents and know quite a lot about
their families, I would not know enough about their school lives in order to
accurately write two chapters about them as teenagers, especially if my
parents were not alive for me to ask them any questions that come up.  This
must mean that, while some of the foundation material for these chapters is
accurate, much of it was just added detail which the author created as
fillers.  One very particularly  unrealistic character description in these
chapters is that of Grace, Sylvia's best friend while attending boarding
school during the Victorian era.  
The author never says the exact words, but it is implied by the ones she
does use that Grace is gay.  Grace would often openly tell her best friend
Sylvia, "I love you." As we now live in a time when people are finding it
hard to come out and even commit suicide because of it, it seems strange
that a girl in 1900 will be so open about her feelings.
Do I regret reading this book? No; I did find the story of Sally's family
interesting and the few bits of cultural differences enticing.  Therefore, I
shall leave it up to the reader of this review to decide whether or not this
book is worth their time.

_______________________________________________
Writers Division web site
http://writers.nfb.org/
stylist mailing list
stylist at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/stylist_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
stylist:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/stylist_nfbnet.org/bkpollpeter%40gmail.com