3-2-1 Response 2: Carolyn Parkhurst

For my second 3-2-1 response paper I chose to attend a reading by Carolyn Parkhurst on Thursday, November 8, 2011 at the Research Hall room (163) on George Mason Campus at 7:00pm. Ms. Parkhurst read from her most recent novel Nobodies Album. The novel centers on a writer, Octavia, who is trying to excise any personal passages from her original (successful) novels. She is also dealing with the arrest of her estranged son, who is charged with murder, and her own tragedy that has warped her from an idealist to an inveterate cynic. The novel, and by necessity the narrator, is very meta and deals with writing about writing, and what (if anything) is too personal to write about. This meta-cognitive aspect to the work is fascinating, and certainly a very unique thing to write about: writing about writing about writing, and so on.

In addition to the meta aspect of the novel, I felt that the narrator’s voice and the idea of writing as a living thing were two very important pieces of the novel. Octavia the narrator is wonderfully “prickly”, as Parkhurst describes her. She feels compelled to write stories that are bitter and linger in readers minds like the poisoned seeds of some terrible idea. Her own worldview has become warped by tragedy, and so she seems to pass on that way of viewing life through her own works. And that is where the final aspect of the novel comes into play, the idea that words, that writing, is a living thing. Once you put something down on paper that thought escapes to grow in the minds of others, who in turn cultivate it in still other people. There is no way to contain an idea or a thought, and so that is why what Olivia is trying to do is so unusual; if she re-writes her stories’ endings, can she in some way kill the original idea?

There were one or two ideas that I would have liked Ms. Parkhurst to expand on; for instance, what are her own views on what is too personal to write about? Does she feel that any experience is fair game, or does she prefer to limit what she writes about family and friends (unlike David Sedaris in his short story “Repeat After Me”). Additionally, does she view writing as a living thing? And if so, when does it become alive? Is it alive once the thought has entered her mind, or does writing only live when it is shared and allowed to plant ideas in the soil of others’ minds?

I suppose the best way to end this response would be to ask the same question Octavia’s publishers ask her as she sets out on her journey to correct her novel: who would want to read revised endings of successful stories? Would you, or would you, as readers, feel a proprietary interest in the story and reject any executive meddling after the fact—that is, after publishing?