Word: memoirize
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...turning the lightning strike of a single image, perhaps inspired by an incident like the one above, into plays. But it's not all that he's been doing. He's freelanced as a political speechwriter, teacher, radio program host, bit-part actor and inveterate agitator. In his new memoir Days Like These (Melbourne University Press; 285 pages) Gurr reveals what's been going on in the rooms of his mind and casts his wisdom to the world beyond the writer's sanctuary. This form, he says, is radically different territory for him; less visceral, more conscious and considered...
...Theatre Company from Ray Lawler, creator of Australia's most celebrated drama, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. For those familiar with Gurr's plays-from the aids-era's DesireLines through to Crazy Brave, Sex Diary of an Infidel, Jerusalem and his recent Something to Declare, about refugees-his memoir is an opportunity to understand how those plays came about. His creative ideal: Never invent, only reveal. He brings a reader close enough to taste the rumble between what he describes as "the unconscious impulse and the internal editor." "Whenever I've tried to modify the first impulse...
...courage in laying his soul bare. The cumulative effect is a gritty grace: depth of character, tenderness and the masculinity that you find in the muscular work of novelists such as Philip Roth or Richard Ford. In form and heart, with its floating chronology and candor, Gurr's memoir springs from a sensibility close to that of the late Arthur Miller in his masterly Timebends. In it, he's telling two stories. There's the public history of shared experience, a critique of the times, inviting a connection. But the quiet story is more compelling; the struggle inside the mind...
...strong sense of "honoring the domestic." "It's not just to do with the man I live with," he says of his home life. "Part of it is an antidote to the wildness of the imagination." Gurr says he was three-quarters of the way through writing the memoir before he realized its hidden purpose: "To put a bit of steel back into the language of ideas that have come to be seen as soft, nebulous, weak," he says, before pausing. "All the things that have been stripped out of the national conversation." Despite his fury, Gurr is free...
Eggers is, of course, a famous writer: he is the author of the bestselling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It's odd that the two men even know each other, but a few years ago Deng was looking for someone to help him write his life story, and a charitable foundation for Sudanese refugees helped him reach out to Eggers. Intrigued, Eggers agreed to a meeting, and the two became friends. Now they've collaborated on a moving, frightening, improbably beautiful book, a lightly fictionalized version of Deng's life titled What Is the What: The Autobiography...