Who gets to tell your story?

1. Been reading the new Blake Butler memoir for the past few days. It’s about his former wife and her death. Her name was Molly and the book is also called Molly.

2. The story is sad, and troubling, and yet also interesting. One of the friends of his former wife started complaining about his right to write about it. You can catch up on that here.

1. I haven’t finished the book yet, I got it yesterday, and honestly I can’t stop reading it. I don’t know Blake personally, but I’ve read his main work and side work (HTMLGiant, Fanzine) over the years and I was always on the side of this little literary community looking in.

2. I found much of his previous fiction writing very, uh…hard, maybe purposefully off-putting, like it needs to be discerned not be read

3. But this book still has some of those craft elements, but it also just flows, it pours out fast, and Blake said as much in this interview:

4. Because it’s about two writers and two writers writing their stories (his wife Molly wrote her own memoir about being the daughter of a bank robber) there’s so much being said, and then so much to say, and then specific angling(?) of events and memories, because who can’t angle and add their point of view to their memories? It happens, it happens right away, it can’t be stopped.

5. But then there are receipts, right? Things that did happen, and then perhaps disagreement about what that means and what that doesn’t mean and the moralizing. Because Molly was a writer, she kept notes, journals, emails. Those are rich texts.

6. It’s a good book, read it

7. I hope it gets a big audience, it deserves one, a Netflix movie or something.

8. Here’s a link to the book.

9. There were also some pieces(?) in some tabloid newspapers about Blake and Molly’s relationship because some odd things happened. Did they get to tell the story too?

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I’m not done with the book, so I won’t go any further into specifics, but the whole exercise and Blake’s interview above, had me wondering:

• How would my wife write about me?

• Will she?

• How about my children?

I don’t write much about my family. I did it a few times, small vignettes of stories and life events and then I realized I didn’t want to do that anymore. I didn’t feel like I had anything more to say in regard to those topics.

I also wouldn’t say that my family has anything as compelling as what Blake is writing about or what Molly wrote in her memoir.

I don’t feel like I have anything profound to say on those things, they are (mostly) locked in my mind for now.

But I haven’t asked my children or my wife explicitly if I could write about them, I prefer the “influenced by” route, as a genesis and spark of ideas.

Or maybe I don’t want to think about it. Or maybe I don’t want to focus on those hard things, my failures, the ups/downs of my family and how I’m (negatively/positively) impacting them.

This isn’t to say Blake or anyone else shouldn’t write memoir.

I like reading memoirs.

A lot of stories haven’t been told, and many need to be.

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More Things:

• I can’t even talk about end of the year things, there are so many. I’ll do mine next week. But if for some reason, you haven’t had enough, here are some lists from podcasts I (generally) enjoy

  • IndieCast on the best albums of the year

  • The Big Picture podcast on their favorite movies of the year

• Is the campus novel dead? At Esquire.

• 40 for 40 by

  Stephanie Danler

• A good answer by

  Max Read
  about why big pubs cover AI the way they do.

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Last Thing:

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.” — Sue Monk Kidd

Keep going,

-Josh Spilker