A book on the darker arts of writing

The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Joyce Carol Oates
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

More literary and less personal than I thought it would be and she does focus a lot on white male authors (Joyce, Hemingway, Faulkner etc--though quite a lot on Virginia Wolf) as one goodreads reviewer points out; still a solid read about writing with a different angle than one usually gets (see Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird or Stephen Kings On writing). I found many compelling passages: "One is born not to suffer but to negotiate with suffering, to choose or invent forms to accommodate it" (67) or "writing, for me, is primarily remembering" (140).

This is not, though, a book for those wanting a pick-me-up, a motivational tract with inspirational quotations about writing (except for the predictable "Write your heart out." In fact many of the histories and tidbits are bound to chase a would-be writer away as when she cites Virginia Wolfe who declares that she lived in despair while writing and only found her books tolerable once she had forgotten what she had meant to write.


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