Habits: the good, the bad, and the pointless
Unhelpful voices from grad school, and a terrific water, beach, and landscape memoir grappling with childhood demons.
Hallo, readers!
Last week I went looking for shapeshifters. The quest was prompted by a reader. She suggested that the opening chapter of my book would be more appealing to if I could, at the start, “give the reader a monster.”
This was great advice. The best narrative nonfiction contains many more examples - stories - than an academic monograph. Stories with people in them need to take reader to the points the author wants to get across.
I knew immediately where to look for shapeshifters - where I had already found them: Mesoamerica.
Jaguar-shamans. Ritual specialists. I went down a rabbit-hole of Trying to Read All The Things: bemoaning sources that weren’t immediately available. Collecting and downloading those that were. Flitting between books and PDFs like an indecisive locust.
I often over-apply readers’ comments. A dissertation advisor once suggested I add something about the books from which Renaissance mapmakers drew information about the world’s peoples. So I added a 15,000-word chapter.
Even worse, my dissertation examiners (i.e. two people who are not your dissertation advisors but who read the final dissertation, run the defense, and decide whether you pass or fail) complained about having to wade through THREE contextual chapters and an introduction before meeting, on page 120, a chapter about the subject of the dissertation. It was a 400-page screen with an additional, unpaginated volume containing 324 illustrations. (Enthusiasm? Lack of confidence.)
For narrative nonfiction, one needs to shed various grad school habits. That meant starting with this one: hit everything with a sledgehammer before checking whether five minutes with a toothpick would get the job done.
I remember when the sledgehammer became the tool of choice. It was partway through grad school. I was a half-time student and a half-time British Library curator. Repeated applications for a PhD studentship had gone nowhere: if I were doing this PhD, it would have to be this way. Evidently, despite having published two articles in academic journals, I was the worst grad student in the country. (…) I would need to rely on something other than talent.
Why was I bothering with this PhD, you ask? Because writing words is what my brain needs to be doing regularly, in order not to feel like pieces of my body are breaking off and falling on the floor. I’m the literary equivalent of the (starving) artist.
But almost no one at my institution seemed to find my project interesting. I was working on Europe’s early encounters with the Americas. The institution was devoted to classical antiquity (mainly of Greece and Rome) and its legacy. When I told people what I was working on, I saw their faces fall and boredom set in. Pliny the Elder had never written about the Americas, so apparently it didn’t matter.
By the end of the second half-time year, I had to pass the official upgrade to the PhD: to submit a piece of writing, at least 7,000 words long, to show that I could reach the required standard. Having submitted a couple of such pieces along the way (always comfortably longer than the minimum), I knew that my arguments weren’t landing as well as I would have liked.
So I pulled out a sledgehammer.
I would present my advisors with so many examples from the primary sources that it would be clear that there was a topic and an argument. That’s what I did, over 15,000 or so words. And I cleared the upgrade hurdle (phew).
But now it’s time to break that habit. I’m not writing a monograph - a one-track, one-topic book as deep as I can go. HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY ranges over thousands of years and tens of thousands of miles.
It’s HARD not to feel that I must read all the things before picking the “best”, most representative, or significant example/s. But I have picked a couple of shapeshifters, and they are fun. I can look for more after getting to the end of draft 2.
What matters in the end is getting stories that matter to the readers who would like them - the general reader. And that means putting voices and critiques that no longer matter out of my head.
A Flat Place: a memoir by Noreen Masud
Staying with last week’s watery theme, here’s another book for the beach:
It took me two weekends to inhale, in its entirety, Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place: a memoir (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin Random House, 2023). Another of my Hay Festival discoveries, this book braids together two plots. One is Masud’s memoir of her flight to Scotland, with her British mother and sisters, from her father in Pakistan who had just disowned them.
The other is a travelogue of her visits to flat places in the UK: places whose expansive skies and endless horizons allowed her to unpack some of the trauma of what had been a cramped and shuttered life in a deeply unusual household in Islamabad. This was a period in which flat, endless fields glimpsed on the school run had captured her imagination and offered the promise of something else.
Masud takes us to a number of watery places, including Ely, the Cambridgeshire cathedral city in the fenlands. Ely used to spend a good part of the year as an island surrounded by malarial marshes. Eels where everywhere.
My own experience of Ely centres on The Old Fire Engine House, a local restaurant that opened in 1968, and which used to have eel on the menu regularly. I haven’t been to Ely in over decade, but this place used to be pretty fabulous. But I never dared eat the eel, which other diners told me was Really Fishy.
Orkney, Newcastle Moor, and Orford Ness get their own chapters. Orford Ness had once been a military testing area. The tour of the flat also takes the reader to Morecambe Bay, just past Lancaster in the northwest of England. Here, in 2004, more than twenty trafficked people from China drowned. They had been picking cockles; the tide came in.
In the corners of this memoir-travelogue is a critique of British double standards: white people expect bad things to happen to Black and brown people, be it Rapunzelesque lockdowns for girls or gruelling working conditions. Yet the same conditions are deemed inhumane when they are visited upon white people.
This struck a chord: “Everyone makes deals around the humanity of other people, and how consistently they allow that humanity to be present to them.” (p. 35.)
This encapsulates a mindset that enables people to perpetuate harm - within their own families and at the level of global geopolitics. Perhaps if more people with power and/or wealth sat with the deals they have (subconsciously) made about who counted as human, and recognized that we are all human, some of the existential problems facing humanity might not take on quite the same level of apocalypse.
In prose that is clear and still and yet vivid, A Flat Place inspires me to really, really listen for the words that want to be heard. It reminds me of two books whose styles, story arcs, and voices stayed with me: Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment, and Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild. I wrote a note about Islands in a lemur-filled newsletter here.
A wondrously beautiful and powerful read, I am in awe of A Flat Place.
Noreen Masud, A Flat Place: a memoir (Hamish Hamilton/PRH, 2023).
Cal Flyn, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape (PRH, 2022).
Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (Picador/Pan MacMillan, 2018 [first published 1996]).
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