biography

In an interview I read a couple of years ago, Hilary Mantel describes reading as a writer as being partly about constantly tracking how the story is told. In other words, she couldn't help but pay close attention to what was being done to her by the author on the other end of her interaction with whatever book she was reading. I have moments like that, but they're mainly flashes of wonder: stepping outside John McPhee's description of taking a walk in Alaska while his compatriots readied their canoes for a river journey and thinking, "How in the hell is he making this incredibly mundane experience so compelling?"

New resolution is to pay closer attention to that, not just from a prose standpoint but from a structure standpoint. Might even start taking notes sometimes. Other resolution is to start reading more great biographies. I am seized by the idea of writing a biography of Jack, as I was this summer by my dream/vision of him as a 46-year-old with a teenaged daughter. That ran aground, as I've said before, on the need to make sure such a projection is true to who he was, that the intervening decades grow organically from the point where in this universe he ended his life. And so the more I thought about that, the more I realized that I needed to grapple with and understand and face his life. What a life he lived, what a life we all lived around him. But it's very difficult to know where to start. The most I have is snatches of this and that, a kind of haphazard list of Things To Talk About.

• How he died, when, where
• His itinerantness
• The joys of our suburban childhood, brotherhood
• The puzzlement we all felt at his early and persistent pessimism
• Laughing at him when he got angry because he was so cute
• Playing "bang" and "sock wars" in the backyard and in the addition just after it was finished and before we had any furniture. 
• Tickling him and Lincoln until they couldn't take it anymore, the "ultimate punishment"
• Drumming
• His drive to practice anything he wanted to be good at: dribbling, popping wheelies, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4
• His athleticism
• The inadequacy of our mental healthcare system, and the competence and compassion of some of the people working it
• Mom and Dad's (especially Mom's) relentless advocacy for and support to him
• Heroin, cocaine, meth, and the drug crisis
• Lincoln's moving and profound acknowledgement, during the memorial service in May, of Jack's shame at his own inability to meet the expectations of a capitalist, patriarchal society
• Words: poetry, rap, Scrabble
• That brief moment after his coma, before he'd been prescribed new psych meds, when he was detoxed from any and all chemicals and as lucid and clear and happy as I ever saw him, ripping through One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Hobbit
• Jail and juvie
• Scars and physical brokenness, the toll that years of mental illness and drug abuse and losing control of himself took on his body
• His dignity, his despair

And so on.

Right now I'm reading Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World, by Joshua Freeman, and Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie. Also The Island of Doctor Moreau, out loud with SRB. Once those are done, time to start in on some biographies. 

Also, time to start doing a bit of research on oral history techniques. And, well, research.