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Sentimentality And Memoir

Getting some love for The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming today from Texas. From my pal Bill Holston’s review in the online version of D Magazine, out of Dallas: If I had to find a single word to describe this book it would be honest.  Dreher  does not paint a one dimensional portrait of anyone […]

Getting some love for The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming today from Texas. From my pal Bill Holston’s review in the online version of D Magazine, out of Dallas:

If I had to find a single word to describe this book it would be honest.  Dreher  does not paint a one dimensional portrait of anyone  including himself. The story of his sister’s life and death moves Dreher to acknowledge his own weaknesses and his part in the pain that is in his family. It moves him to a conversion of sorts, and to reconciliation with those he had harmed or been harmed by. It is here that the story is most powerful.

Meanwhile, in the Longview News-Journal, Frank Pool, a reader of this blog, gives a fine review. Excerpt:

If a specter haunts the sleep of serious writers, it is the specter of sentimentality.

To be sentimental is to rush too quickly to the emotional climax, to linger over poignancy, to pluck too hard on the harp strings of feeling. Better to be ironic, distant, astringent, and hard-edged.

Writing a book about the death of your 42-year-old sister from lung cancer, the lives she still touches, the grieving people she left behind, sounds like a recipe for sentimentality.

Yet — and this is a small miracle — Rod Dreher has written a deeply emotional tribute to his late sister that avoids sentimentality.

… There is no trite and sentimentally happy ending here, though great happiness and love suffuse the book. Sentimentality says “love is all you need.” Hard-won wisdom instructs us that love is the prerequisite for happiness, but to love rightly demands effort, clarity, and honesty.

Thank you, Texas friends, for your generous words. It is gratifying to read that the book does not come across as sentimental. I’ve heard from several readers that they’ve found it surprisingly good at avoiding that trap. This is where a good editor’s hand shows itself, I’m sure, but it’s also the case that I wrote it in a state of hypervigilance against sentimentality, because I knew that the content of the story itself would make this trap very hard to avoid.

As I wrote, I tried to let the events speak for themselves; they needed no spiking with sentimentality for the sake of effect. If anything, I toned down the tearjerking parts a smidge, out of fear of mawkishness. More broadly, the story I had to tell wasn’t a biography of a plaster saint, but the story of a woman who was deeply good — and indeed saintly — but also flawed in a tragic way, i.e., her best qualities also had a shadow side, one that suspended her great gift of empathy when it came to me. That was simply the truth. But it was also the truth that I was no mere victim, but also a victimizer, at times, who played a key role in setting the conditions for my own unhappy situation alienated from my sister — a dynamic, as I write, that I see playing out with my own children today.

Plus, this is the tragic story of a father — my own — who lost his dear child through no fault of his own, but who was in part responsible for losing his other child (me) earlier by driving him away with his own intolerant, overbearing expectations about what a son of his should be like. The tragedy is not that my dad didn’t love me; the tragedy is that he loved me too fiercely, and held me too tight.

The fact that this story has no easy heroes or simple villains helps, I think, guard against sentimentality. That, and the decision I made early on to respect the truth of the story, however messy and inconvenient for a tidy moral lesson and Hollywood happy ending. To sentimentalize is to turn a story into kitsch, into something that we know will make people cry, and to take pleasure in the orchestration of the tears. I was genuinely surprised to hear back from early readers that Little Way made the cry so much. I should have known that this would be the case, but I was so invested in preventing sentimentality that I really didn’t know how readers would react emotionally. Based on the reaction so far, you’ll cry when you read this book, but the tears don’t come cheap.

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