For our community read this past March 2013, the librarians in Port Townsend, where I live, chose Pam Houston’s novel Contents May Have Shifted, a story, they felt to be about love and freedom in middle age, something dear to the hearts of many in this community. At the top of the month the library distributed free copies of the book to community members, maintained many copies for the library to lend to those who weren’t quick enough to get free copies, and facilitated book discussions and lectures on the craft of the novel as well as panels and entertaining events that corresponded to themes in the book (a panel of therapists presenting A Smorgasbord of Alternative Therapies, a showing of the film Shirley Valentine, and a workshop on Collaborative Play and Creativity). In one presentation, Judith Kitchen, memoirist, novelist, and book critic, talked about the book from a writer’s perspective–focusing among other things on what it means to the writing that Pam Houston says her book is 82% true because although based on real events of her life, it has a “shattered narrative” and she has created composite characters and introduced a very few places the character in the book, also named Pam, travels to that the author Pam hasn’t yet. This week we present the first part of Judith Kitchen’s talk in which she describes herself reading as a writer reads. Next week, we’ll publish part two in which she specifically addresses Houston’s book. You can use the look inside feature on Amazon to get a feel for the book and click over to the Iowa Review website as well as here to the Spring 2011 issue of the magazine for more excerpts. Additionally, this website, TNB, has another excerpt.

Judith Kitchen on Reading As a Writer Reads, Part 1
(Presented in Port Townsend, WA , March 25, 2013 for the 2013 Town Community Read of Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted)

This town is full of readers. They pile up at the library desk and make it almost impossible to run in to get the movie and get out again in time for Exercise for Health at the hospital. They buy books by the dozens, and if you’re not careful they might give you a lecture about how you have to support local stores, but secretly you order from Amazon anyway because local, in this case, might mean driving an hour to Bainbridge. Still, you can almost always have a good conversation about a movie or a book.

It’s always been my assumption that readers want a good story, and that writing should not get in the way of that. I always assume that if I can make things clear, readers will just follow along and I won’t have to fuss with them. That is, if I do a lot of hard work, readers will think it is easy. They’ll just slip right inside my words and think they’ve figured out what the book is all about before I have.

For me, writing reviews of books involves picking a book apart and then putting it back together again, and I get letters—or used to get letters, now I get emails—from authors saying things like “You taught me something about my work,” or “You’ve understood exactly what I hoped I was doing,” so, naturally, when I’m reading, I do start to think I’ve figured everything out before the writer has. Second, I have what I’ll call writer’s envy—so if a book is really well written, I pick it apart in a different way. What worked/what didn’t. One reason I do that is so I can proclaim what didn’t work when someone else tells me how good that book is. Another is so I can figure out what did work and I can steal a bit for myself, but surreptitiously, only enough that no one can call me a so-and-so wannabe.

Of course, I’m envious of lots of great writers.   So I’ll leave them out of this. There are very few contemporary writers where I forget my incipient envy long enough to simply enjoy the book on its own terms, and that makes me sad, but there it is. I never question Stuart Dybek. I just sit back and let him take me where he wants. But that may be because he produces a book about every ten years and I’ve been waiting so long that it feels like a birthday party.

I used to feel that way about Colum McCann—that is until he wrote one novel that mentioned a lot about upstate New York, Syracuse to be exact, but he didn’t know that I grew up in upstate New York, a town called Painted Post to be exact, which is about ninety miles southwest of Syracuse, and so when I found one wrong “fact,” I was instantly on the alert. Then I found another, and then another. On top of that, he painted us all as hicks and rednecks and racists—we who had been home to Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass and the underground railroad—and he himself had probably never gone more than twenty-five miles north of his probably snazzy apartment in Manhattan, which was his vengeance on growing up poor in Ireland, and so he took it out on us. Pretty soon everything in that novel (named best book of the year by just about everybody) was suspect and I was reading next to my computer (which is where I discovered that he was only three months older than my first son) so I could hit Google and look up the detail whenever something felt false, which was often, because I remembered the 1970s, and even the 1950s, and so it seemed natural to wonder if, in fact, there had been a Denny’s back then, because I sure didn’t remember one—and this was a novel, I mean, really!

Alice Munro is a good example of someone I am not yet picking apart. I don’t want to pick her apart; I want to go inside one of those quiet Canadian stories and never come out. I believe everything in them, and that’s probably because she makes me believe in her characters before she introduces anything that might need an almanac to check it out. Or Pico Iyer. He goes to so many places and has such a good time and discovers so many interesting things that I forget to wonder if all of it could be true. I mean, nonfiction just begs you to become fact-checker extraordinaire, but I don’t even question whether the places Pico Iyer travels to exist, say nothing of resemble his descriptions, so maybe someone who has been there—someone like, say, Pam Houston—should be the one to pick him apart.

Sometimes those books make me think about all the places I haven’t been, and then I feel inadequate; I make lists and then realize I don’t even want to pack my bags. Besides, I’ve been to 49 states, and I don’t mean just driving through on the expressway; I mean staying overnight and eating in diners and learning how to play blackjack and walking into a man-made lake and going over the Rockies on the first day the pass was open and even not turning off to see the “home of throwed rolls” after 1500 miles of signs that convinced us we just had to go there. Not that you have to go places, but that a writer should write about other people and places, shouldn’t she?

So—this envy, which is a bit like looking at catalogues from West Elm or Crate & Barrel, or online at Joss & Main, and seeing a piece of furniture you just want to own. You know, the painted chest, or the Moroccan tiled coffee table, or even the fluffy sea green bath towels. You imagine them in your own house and they seem so perfect, but your house is already stuffed to the gills, so then you think about what it would displace and how you’d have to find a way to take that to Goodwill, or you could give it to your son in Puyallup who could use it, but how would you get it to Puyallup, and pretty soon you see that that wonderful new item probably wouldn’t quite fit, or what if you didn’t like a round table after all, or that it’s really far too expensive, and you decide to wait a while because something more perfect is likely to crop up later. In other words, your coveting wanes and you go back to your own familiar voice. And your towels aren’t all that bad even if they are blue and orange.

Besides, who wants sea green? They’re worthy of your husband’s ex-wife. The one who insisted on three separate divorces in two states. No, she’d go for pure white, which is even worse. How do you wipe your possibly still-dirty hands on a white towel? Or maybe she’d be even more pretentious and have little individual linen-like things she found at a bazaar in Peru.

All this, and I haven’t even come to the business of looking at the way a book has been put together—the jigsaw puzzle of a writer’s design—so maybe I should get going. My friend Dave would tell me that reading Contents May Have Shifted is like watching Lionel Messi thread his way down the soccer pitch and I’d know exactly what he means. My friend Mitzi would say “It’s like eating a tangerine,” and she wouldn’t even need to follow up with “that burst of flavor” for me to understand. But M.J. would say “It’s like living in Memphis, if you know what I mean,” but no, I don’t.

I don’t think I’ve given you a sense of reality here—you know, the place names and details that make something feel, well, real. So why don’t we just have lunch at The Cup and I’ll tell you more? Or breakfast at the Bayview, where the eggs Benedict are truly to kill for? Or else we could try that new place, Pippa’s, for tea, because I still haven’t gone there.

I’ll tell you all about my grandchildren. That should take your mind off where this began and why it hasn’t gotten anywhere. I’ll tell you about Ian, who just turned eight. When I asked him what he thought should be done about one of his friends, he simply retorted, “Well, I’m the kind who retaliates.”

And that is my Pam Houston lip sync. Or my dissection of her method of delivery. Which is: start somewhere, some place, and do a little riff about the place, the people, the circumstance, etc. Let it digress into the Alice Munro or Joss & Main; let it meander a bit, but at a fast pace. Maybe insert just a bit of tension. Jealousy is good. Abandon your opening gambit. Change direction, or subject. Or tense. Confuse the reader a little. End with something snappy, something that seems to have wisdom even if perhaps, on close inspection, it isn’t all that wise. Even if, on close inspection, it is non sequitur. Leave ‘em wanting more. Then begin again.