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“The greatest fortune that can befall an author is not to be read, a painter not to be seen, or to be seen with haste, like on those horrendous group museum tours: as long as the work is talked about, obviously. Or, if they see you, if they read you, you’re fortunate to be misunderstood. If they understand you, no one will think you’re right; if they don’t understand you, everyone will project onto you their inchoate desires, their secret dreams. And your success is assured.” — Paul Klee, explaining to a writer the benefits of not being read, from Giovanni Orelli’s Walaschek’s Dream (trans. by Jamie Richards). (via writersnoonereads)
“Sex Education” by Dorothy Canfield Fisher from the Center for Fiction
Dan Chaon on “Sex Education” by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Our Model Short Story series, in which we ask a prominent short story writer to recommend a classic, continues….
I have long been interested in writers who have fallen into neglect. Dorothy Canfield Fisher is, unfortunately, among those whose work is seldom read these days, though she was quite famous in her time. The author of 35 books, some of them bestsellers, many of her stories appearing in Best American Short Stories and O. Henry anthologies, she was also a noted educational reformer and social activist who was once named among the ten most influential women in the United States by no less than Eleanor Roosevelt. Now, she is primarily known for the annual children’s book award that bears her name. Few of her books remain in print.
So it’s a pleasure to have a chance to introduce new readers to her wonderful short fiction. “Sex Education” is a beautiful and strange story about, among other things, the telling of stories. It has an unusual and compelling structure—the main character, Aunt Minnie, tells the same story three different times over a period of decades, and each time she tells the story it transforms in major ways, taking on radically different shadings and meanings, altering details. It’s a kind of Rashoman talein reverse, the same person remembers, then re-remembers, then remembers again. It suggests the elasticity of memory, as well as the ways that we might lie to ourselves about our own motivations, and it has challenging and complex things to say about what Aunt Minnie calls “this man-and-woman business.”
I love the way the story compresses forty years of an ordinary woman’s life into a few pages, so simply and skillfully, and so heart-breakingly. I love the way Canfield Fisher uses unshowy, conversational language to reveal complex psychological depths. “There just aren’t any words to say something that’s so both-ways-at-once,” Aunt Minnie says. But Dorothy Canfield Fisher proves Aunt Minnie wrong.
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Nora Chaon 2005-2012. Rest in Peace.
Review of Stay Awake in The New Republic:
“In his subsequent three books, another collection, Among the Missing, and two novels, the dismal, compelling You Remind Me of Me and the grisly, repellent Await Your Reply, Chaon established himself as America’s pre-eminent Anti-Resilience-Of-The-Human-Spirit literary provocateur, a laudable and necessary role. Chaon’s characters may persist; they may endure; but, refreshingly, they do not prevail.”
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Interview in January Magazine:
I don’t think I’m a particularly dark or gloomy person in real life. I think that most people who know me think of me as pretty cheerful. I joke a lot, and like to make people laugh. Sometimes I have a cynical or morbid sense of humor, but it’s strange because I don’t think I dwell on the darker side of things. At least not in my daily interactions.
Writing is different than waking life, though. I don’t feel any urgency to explore the stuff that makes me comfortable and content. I’m after some kind of shadow-self, or shadow-life, not the same as my own. I’m interested in outsiders, not because I am one but because I feel I might have become one. I’m interested in people who screw up and do desperate things because, even though I’m generally conservative and cautious in my approach to the world, I have thought screwed up and desperate thoughts. I am interested in scary things because walking through them somehow makes me feel calmer and safer.
It’s the “what if,” of fiction that makes me want to write it. I don’t do memoir or autobiography, partially because my life isn’t very interesting, but also partially because the other life is what compels me.
For example, there’s certainly some autobiographical detail in the story “Take This Brother, May It Serve You Well.” It’s about a man who loses his wife to cancer, which happened to me. But the character in the story is overwhelmed with anger and grief, and sinks into some very dangerous, weird, self-destructive behavior that leads him almost certainly to his doom. I personally didn’t go off the deep end like Deagle did in the story, but I sure thought about it a lot. I sure sometimes wished I could let the monster inside me run loose, and maybe, in some ways, writing that story was a way to save myself.
And that’s one of the things fiction does for us — it lets us travel to the places we shouldn’t travel to in real life. And we learn something in that journey, as readers and as writers.
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