Letter writing and composition

¶ … Jennifer:

'I have nothing to write about. Nothing interesting ever happens to me.' Before I read Adam Gopnik's collection of essays about his life as a New Yorker entitled Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York, I would often use this as an excuse for staring at the blank page of my computer screen. But this is no longer the case. Gopnik's prose illustrated to me that it is possible to make even very mundane events seem exciting and profound. It is not so much what you write about but how you write about it that is important.

This can be seen in Gopnik's essay on his daughter's imaginary friend Charlie Ravioli. Although many children have imaginary friends, Gopnik presents his daughter Olivia as an unusually precocious little girl who has a very complex relationship with Charlie. Charlie is always too busy to have dinner with her or to go on play dates. He becomes a representative of all overscheduled city children, who are constantly being shuttled from one activity to the next. Gopnik uses dramatic dialogue to make the reader both laugh and think at the same time, without making his point in a heavy-handed way. He 'shows' rather than tells us as a writer. That is why I know you would love his writing and why I was inspired to write to you today.

One of the problems with reading nonfiction essays is when the writer makes use of fictional techniques like dialogue. It is easy to wonder: is this how the events really happened? How does the writer remember everything? Gopnik's characters, including his children, do tend to sound the same, so there is clearly an understanding between the reader and the writer that this is not a transcript from life, such as in another essay when Gopnik's son Luke counsels his father that he should have told his sister the truth about her dead fish. Gopnik takes some poetic license because it is impossible to write down exactly how something happened, given how subjective our experiences can be. At best, in writing memoirs, we can only suggest how the experience was for those who lived it. This idea is very freeing, and allows me as a writer to write about 'the truth' without feeling as though I have to be a newspaper reporter, solely sticking to the facts of who, what, why, when, and how. But, of course, it is also important to have your eye open as a writer for incidents which are taken from life and contain profound metaphorical truths. This occurs in an essay entitled "Second Thanksgiving," Olivia prompts her parents to name something that is a thing but isn't a thing, stumping them before finally revealing her answer of the Twin Towers (Gopnik 196). The slice of life seems so natural and unforced the reader does believe Gopnik that it occurred, as it is one of those instances that feels too truthful to have been made up.