Craft Notes: “Goodbye to All That,” by Eula Biss from Notes from No Man’s La

a.     Voice: Story-telling. Opening up. “I remember” a lot. “I need to tell you,” very informal, like she’s sitting across from me telling me about her life. Destroys fourth wall. Occasionally talks about herself in third person as “the heroine.”

b.      Structure: Chronology—keeps resetting to the beginning and telling the story in a different way. Like she doesn’t know what story to tell yet.

c.       Images: The refrigerator too heavy to carry upstairs, the rank apartment with terrible smells, the ice skating on dull spoons and slush. Threatened by a guy with a lighter. Sexually harassed by an 8-year-old. Leaving New York with not even a bed, no more plants, or snapshots of family.

d.      Phrases: “the myth of New York,” “Just go home/ Do it again.” The apathy and repetition. “I remember the moment when I realized exactly what it had already cost me.” “It’s difficult for me to separate my experience in New York from my sensation of finding the limits of my own independence.” ‘By the time I left New York, I knew that success and failure are silly terms in which to speak of living a life.” “the heroine is not convinced she in the heroine.”

e.      I will take from this the voice of writing like I’m telling an informal story, just searching for ways to say it.

f.        Questions: What was Joan Didion’s essay about (I suppose I find out when I read that one)? Was this story before or after she got her Master’s degree? Or her bachelor’s?