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You are here: Home / Writing / You Are Not Alone

You Are Not Alone

August 4th, 2015 by Sallie Bingham in Writing 5 Comments

Isak Dinesen

Isak Dinesen (pen name of Karen Blixen)

Now and then word comes from cyberspace through my website or Facebook or Twitter—or perhaps delivered by an invisible angel.

Such a message arrived this morning from a woman named Joann who, in a second-hand book store, happened to pick up my twenty-five year old memoir, Passion and Prejudice, falsely subtitled, at the insistence of my editor, A Family Memoir—which gave it a unearned aura of respectability.

Joann, who is digging into her own family’s buried history, writes that my memoir “touched a nerve,” which is what we writers want even if it is oddly reminiscent of bad moments in the dentist’s chair.

My correspondent is one of many women who are trying to find out what the people were like whom they know were their ancestors, without having any notion who they were, people—again, largely women—not only lost to history but lost even to the storytelling that is the only form of history that can be called art.

Whether in total isolation or in the compromised solitude most of us suffer, writers create characters whom our readers recognize, care about, and remember; this is the strand that connects us all.

Isak Dinesen writes in “The Cardinal’s Last Talk” from her Last Tales that the story of the individual is “a noble art, a great, solemn and ambitious human product. But it is a human product” while “the divine art is the story,” dealing with archetypes—heroes and heroines—rather than with individuals limited to their time and place.

But there are few women writers who can imagine their creations as archetypes, least of all as heroines; we seem more comfortable with women characters molded to and formed by their time and place, as we are, and, inevitably, to one degree or another, victims. Perhaps this is why so few women read the writing of women; we are all resisting, as we must, the limitations placed on women characters which are similar to the limitations placed on us.

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson

Paul Therouox’s generous review of Let Me Tell You, a posthumous collection of Shirley Jackson’s writing, is sensitive to the constrictions she lived and wrote under as a wife and mother in the 1940’s and 1950’s, out of which she formed her vision of the inevitability, and the irrationality, of our choice of victims. It takes a writer secure in his own accomplishment and ready to admit, easily, that the “knowing wash-ashores” who never heard of Jackson and probably don’t want to do not control our history, to remember that “The Lottery” still provokes the chill Theroux first felt on reading the story in his high school class in the late 1950’s.

Writing programs have created another version of the writer, akin to the romantic notion of the “poete maudi”—the writer obsessed by his craft and sacrificing everything to it. (I chose the gender of this character wisely.)

This is the theme of Dani Shapiro’s absorbing Still Writing—the question we are all asked, although it is not likely that someone would ask a surgeon, “Still operating?”

Shapiro describes a rusticated life without children or demanding friends or accidents and unforeseen demands, a life where she goes to her desk first thing in the morning (maybe after coffee?) and stays there all day, usually avoiding electronics, lunches with friends, and all the other events and distractions that offer excitement, perhaps, but interrupt the work of the imagination. (She certainly does some of this some of the time, I guess.)

Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro

This was my view of writing when I started, fresh from college, on my first novel. It was also the view that, in two years, led me to despair.

I was missing my life.

Such absorption in the written word is not I think, fruitful of a long career as a writer. We are all stripped, to one degree or another, when we sit down to write; but there must be a leaf, a petal, a bit of sunlight that now and then widens our focus…

There is a happier outcome to this surmise: whether in total isolation or in the compromised solitude most of us suffer, we create characters whom our readers recognize, care about, and remember; this is the strand that connects us all.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “This is a part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you’re not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.”

When, though, do we pay too high a price for belonging? That question fired my writing of Passion and Prejudice.

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In Writing Shirley Jackson Writing Isak Dinesen Dani Shapiro

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Jim Terr on Facebook says

    August 4th, 2015 at 7:11 am

    very good Sallie. Sharing if you don’t mind.

    Reply
  2. John Hancock on Facebook says

    August 4th, 2015 at 8:26 am

    Great book, “Passion and Prejudice”

    Reply
  3. Jan Winter on Facebook says

    August 4th, 2015 at 11:26 am

    Sometimes the words on the page are being whispered in my ear, by someone who knows me better than I know myself.

    Reply
  4. Carol M. Johnson says

    August 4th, 2015 at 2:39 pm

    For 20 years I wrote editorials for a music publishing company, sharing the unique experiences of being a pipe organist, something of a dinasour in today’s world. It was exciting being able to communicate with people of a specific interest, exchanging thoughts through letters they would send. My husband began a journey of Parkinson’s Disease, so I retired from writing to join him on this debilitating 10 year trip, finding as much joy in life as we could create. The journey ended this spring, and until I just read your blog, I did not realize the depth of the longing I am having to be “still writing”. The last few months have been a a time of sorting out who I am, and who I want to still be. Thank you for the nudge you never knew you would be sending to a stranger. As writers we never really know how our words impact others.

    Reply
  5. Jim Terr on Facebook says

    August 4th, 2015 at 4:03 pm

    wow – there ya go.

    Reply

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