hooray for faction

Received this email, referring to the last post about "The Man" et al:

I shared many of your views on the Beth Blog today. I read “The Man” at a very young age and was very profoundly moved by it. In fact, I believe I read it a few times. It was prescient. Great Book.

I was also watching “Judgement at Nuremberg” this week and I always find it powerful.

And then, as to this “Richard” you quote on Downton, well I agree with him also. Concordance is a good thing.

The note is from my friend Richard.

Brava to Carmen Aguirre for her Canada Reads win with Something Fierce, her memoir of fighting the Pinochet regime with her hippy mother. She says in the Globe that as she wrote, she thought of the work as a novel, because she hesitated to expose herself:

"I grappled with that till the very end," she says, "Then I thought, 'Well, have some balls and call it what it is. It's your memory and it's your interpretation of events.' That's what a memoir is." WOO HOO!

Jeanette Winterson has just published a memoir called Why be happy when you could be normal? It's a truthful telling of her nightmare childhood, the exact same story that was presented as fiction in her first book Oranges are not the only fruit. I am very happy that writers like Aguirre and Winterson are finally just telling their true stories, instead of pretending they're made up.

The general feeling about Canada Reads this year seems to be that the books were worthy but some of the panelists were not. At least, that is the opinion of a man whose opinions I value highly: Richard.