Finished! (For now)
On "living in the unknown" while writing a book.
Dear friends,
It has been a week! My littlest child left for her first time at sleepaway camp. My middle child graduated high school last Monday and left for college on Friday (yes, this soon!) all the way across the country. And on the plane trip there, from 30,000 feet in the air, I submitted a complete draft of THE MANY LIVES OF ANNE FRANK.
That’s the working title of the book you all have already heard so much about. It came to me on a trip to Stanford, where my editor had invited me to come speak to his students about Anne Frank and writing biography. At that point, just over a year ago, I was still struggling with the book’s structure. I knew I didn't want to take a strictly chronological approach to Anne’s life. But I didn't have a better idea. Biographies that aren’t chronological can be confusing to the reader; information often gets repeated. How to get around this problem?
I thought about this so much. For inspiration, I reread John McPhee’s famous essay on structure1 with my graduate writing students, taking some comfort in the brutal depiction of writer’s block he opens with:
Out the back door and under the big ash was a picnic table. At the end of summer, 1966, I lay down on it for nearly two weeks, staring up into branches and leaves, fighting fear and panic, because I had no idea where or how to begin a piece of writing for The New Yorker.
Two weeks, huh? I’ll see your two weeks, John, and raise you three years. Yes, that’s how long it took me to come up with this book’s structure.
In nonfiction writing, the structure is often the hardest part. A perfect structure—whether it’s for a profile, essay, feature story, or book-length narrative—fades into the background. Most readers will realize only afterward how brilliantly the work was put together, if they notice at all. But writers know how hard-won all those seamless transitions and striking juxtapositions are.
I’m not sure what it was about the trip to Stanford—the smart questions the students asked; hearing my own voice speak authoritatively about this subject in public for the first time; maybe just the beautiful weather. But it left me energized. And then, standing in the airport waiting to board my plane, the idea came to me. What if I structured my book around Anne’s identities—all the different things she meant, and still means, to people? Right there in the line, I started making a list. Child, refugee, target of Nazi regulations, lover (her relationship with Peter van Pels), prisoner (Westerbork, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen), corpse (her terrible death). All the identities around her diary: witness (the author of testimony), artist (revising it for publication), author. And the different ways in which she goes on living after her death: celebrity (the success of the US publication), ambassador (the play’s dissemination of her story around the world), survivor (all the literature about her), and figurehead (the use of her name and image for political purposes).
This structure would allow me to tell much of Anne’s story chronologically but would be flexible enough to allow me to deviate from that chronology when necessary. More than that, it fits with the way I’ve come to understand Anne’s life and the multifaceted role she has come to play in the world.
As I said, it took me three years to come up with this framework. That’s three years of doing research—reading books, visiting archives, making thousands upon thousands of words of notes—without knowing what I was going to do with all of it. I’ll be honest: that was scary. With Shirley Jackson, I always knew the book would be chronological; the only real decisions to make were how to organize the chapters. But working so long on a project without having a sense of what the finished book was going to look like … it felt like walking a tightrope without a net.
The hardest part of writing this book was dealing with the uncertainty of not having a structure—and trying to have faith in myself and in the process. I listened to the #amwriting podcast. I read the great newsletters about craft that Jami Attenberg sends, and screenshotted this quote for my desktop:
I also returned regularly to these wise words from Kimberly McCreight. I’m writing nonfiction, obviously, but it still works:
How do you get yourself through the hardest parts of writing? Tell me in the comments.
What I’m reading
My Robert Caro project has been on hiatus for the past month. I miss him! Looking forward to getting back into it. I’m planning to start Volume 3, Master of the Senate, this week.
Where I’ll be
My 92Y interview with Dina Kraft is now on YouTube. Dina did a masterful job helping Anne’s childhood best friend, Hannah Goslar-Pick, tell her own life story. It’s a brilliant and beautiful book—and deservedly a best-seller.
From the Shirley Jackson files
“The Lottery” celebrated its 75th anniversary last week! Ever since I started working on my book about Jackson, people have been asking me how I think it translates to the modern day. In this New York Times op-ed, I argue that its message for us now is embedded within the deeply discomfiting reactions that story evokes in its readers. “Readers across the political spectrum seem to be losing their appetite for literary discomfort … But if we view intellectual dissonance as a problem to fix rather than an opportunity for discussion, our cultural climate suffers.”
As ever,
Ruth
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are considered, by some, to dream.”—Shirley Jackson, “The Haunting of Hill House”
Are there any other really good pieces of writing that focus specifically on structure? Tell me in the comments!
I like the structure you describe. It will allow you, as you say, to sometimes deviate from chronology. I think readers are attracted to biography because of chronology, but they also get tired when the chronology is slavish and amounts to just reporting one damn thing after another.
Congratulations, Ruth, on all the milestones with your children as well as the big one of finishing your draft. And what a wonderful piece this was. Re finding the right structure for a book. Of all the challenges in writing a book, I've always found figuring out the structure to be the most interesting. And finding the answer to be the most gratifying. Furthermore, when I finally do figure it out what I believe it should be, it always feels as if it already existed and had been there all the time, waiting for me to discover it. Fortunately I've never had an editor tell me to change it. To me, once I found my structure, it seemed to exist apart from me, wholly formed. Sort of like our children, except while we're gestating a book, we get to reach inside and move around all the pieces.