News & Blog by Maria Tumarkin
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Since finishing Otherland earlier in the year, I have thought a lot about how to describe it to my friends in Russia and Ukraine who wouldn’t be able to read the book in English. They have been wondering for a while what the whole thing is about and they are counting on a real answer from me, not some pithy one-liner or a spruced-up sales blurb. This is what I wrote to two of them (loosely translated...
And finally to finish this thread up: Australian historian and writer Inga Clendinnen (who I consistently admire and consistently disagree with but not this time) writes with a moving admiration about Hilary Mantel’s memoir Giving up the Ghost and her refusal to be reconciled with the injustices of the world, particularly those visited upon children, ‘whose dignity and intelligence are routinely...
More on the subject of mixing non-fiction and your children: When writer Jonathan Myerson came to the defense of his wife Julie Myerson, who was hounded by critics and the public for writing about their teenage son’s drug addiction, he wrote, ‘There is a glass-fronted box in the corner of every writer's room, protecting the real lives of their children: Smash Only In Case Of Emergency.’ A story...
My teenage daughter Billie is one of the main characters in Otherland and all through the book she gets to address readers directly via her diary entries reproduced au naturale minus the spell-check (including the entry, in which Billie suggests that she prefers cleaning ‘cow droppings for a year’ than following me on whatever it is that I do in Moscow), all of which brings me to the vexed question...
I have been really taken by what writer Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in a recent New Yorker essay: ‘memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of literary family’. Mendelsohn compared memoir to a drunken guest at a large gathering. Embarrassing, loud, prone to spilling drinks and other people’s secrets, the guest is cursed with a desperate and, it seems, little-justified need to...
