Judith Thurman in conversation with Lis Harris at Columbia’s Graduate Writing Program’s Nonfiction Dialogue on Wednesday, April 16, 2014.

Judith Thurman spoke about writing nonfiction – specifically biography and literary criticism – at Columbia this past Wednesday, and apparently we were very lucky to hear her since, according to sources, she rarely leaves her house. Ms. Thurman said a lot of really brilliant things, of course she did, because she is brilliant, she’s a critic for The New Yorker, but there were three quotes of hers that stuck with me in particular.

“You have to be able to tolerate contradiction to write good nonfiction.”

A friend and I were talking later about how relieved we were that someone finally just came out and told us this. Contradiction is something that drives nonfiction writers insane. As I work on my own thesis, which involves interviewing my family, my grandmother will tell me something was one way while my grandfather will insist it was another way while my mom won’t even remember the thing at all. It makes me want to scream and write a novel instead. But, Ms. Thurman assured us, that not only do you need to learn to embrace contradiction, but writing about the contradictions of a situation is what makes your story interesting.

“Writing a bad review is a piece of cake. It’s really hard to write a good review.”

Ms. Thurman insisted that she thinks this because she has a particularly nasty streak, but I agree. It’s much easier to find hurtful, angry language that is fresh and unique in its cruelty; writing about something positively runs the risk of falling into the clichés of lovey-dovey talk. This doesn’t mean that Ms. Thurman has only written feel-good-happy-go-lucky reviews in her time, but she encouraged us to write balanced reviews, to think of it as an intellectual challenge to find the good in everything, even something you can’t stand. I think that this applies not just to writing but to life as well. As a friend reminds me, time is better spent putting positive energy out into the world than dwelling on the negative.

“There’s no objectivity, only vigilant subjectivity.”

This goes back to the idea of contradiction in nonfiction, because for as hard as you may try to get at “the truth” – whatever that means – you are still going to come across holes and problems. And, not only that, no matter what you write is subjective because it is filtering through you. Ms. Thurman said that when writing biographies – she has written two, Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette – you, as the writer, are the third point of navigation in the triangle: the subject, everything and everyone around the subject, and you. Especially when writing biography, she said, you grow sick of writing about your subject, you start to resent them because you feel like their handmaid, just waiting on them, devoting your life to their life, and those feelings of bitterness can sneak into your writing. The best you can do is to be aware of and honest about your own biases and prejudices in your writing.

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Ted Conover in conversation with Lis Harris at Columbia’s Graduate Writing Program’s Nonfiction Dialogue on Wednesday, January 29, 2014.

Nonfiction Dialogues, for those not familiar, are a lecture series featuring conversation between Columbia professor and New Yorker veteran Lis Harris and an established nonfiction writer. On Wednesday night, Ted Conover talked about his experiences crossing the Mexican border with illegal immigrants, inspecting meat for the U.S.D.A., freight-train-hopping with hoboes, trailing the wealthy elite of Aspen, and working for a year in Sing-Sing maximum-security prison. Conover, a smaller, unassuming guy with a kind face, looks like someone you would see cheering on his kid at a soccer game and not driving trucks through the AIDS belt of Africa. Yet, he is one of the bravest writers I know. Recently, for his birthday, Conover’s Buddhist father – who seems like a pretty cool dad himself – sent him a magnet that said: “leap and the net will appear.” Conover stressed the importance of jumping into situations, but making sure you do, in fact, have a net before going in – a net such as an assignment from The New Yorker.

Conover spoke of the challenges of undercover journalism – getting things wrong, hurting feelings – and how to handle research holes. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to work with what you don’t have. Absence can be powerful.” Conover also emphasized, even after an immersion, to know your limitations: “When you’re a writer and you put yourself in a story, you have to be aware of the limits of what you can claim to know.” Though he got a good idea of what it felt like to be homeless while riding the rails, Conover has never actually been homeless and, therefore, cannot claim to know what it is really like.

Finally, Conover brought up something many aspiring writers think about: what happens when your family reads your work? It’s one thing to have your parents read about the time you were sexually harassed on the Russian metro; it’s another entirely when you are the parent and your child reads about you smoking weed with Mexican Coyotes. Recently Conover’s teenage son read Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America’s Hoboes. Conover and his son had the following conversation after:

“So, Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“I finished your book.”

“Oh?”

(pause)

“I liked it.”

“Oh, good, good.”

(a few days later)

“So, Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“If you did those things, does it mean I can do them too?”

Conover paused. He didn’t want to be a hypocrite, but he had been thinking of this answer for fifteen years:

“Sure. How about we ride the rails together?”

Most teenagers would cringe at the idea of hopping freight trains with their dad, but Conover is clearly not a regular dad, and so this past July, Conover and his son rode the rails together. The only disappointment was that his son got sick of it after three days.

Conover offered to take Lis Harris with him train-hopping this summer, and I could not be more jealous. Maybe he will let me come along too.

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Diane McWhorter in conversation with Lis Harris at a Columbia Graduate Writing Program Nonfiction Dialogue on Wednesday, October 9, 2013.

When I started in the MFA Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts last fall, I was pummeled with the names of more writers than I knew existed. I walked around with my tail between my legs most of the time. Before starting grad school, I felt I had spent my whole entire life reading, but apparently all the wrong things. It seemed every sentence addressed to me started with: “You’ve really never heard of….?”

I hid out with my syllabi, trying to catch up as fast as I could. I plowed through Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (who I now admire) and Janet Malcolm (who I now respect) and Eudora Welty (who I now adore), just to name a few, and I felt that I had no time, with all this reading, to go to any of the Columbia sponsored after-hours creative writing guest lectures. Besides, why bother going when I hadn’t heard of the person or read their work anyway?

But then sometime last spring, I was lured to one such talk by an author I hadn’t heard of – maybe it was the prospect of free pizza and free wine that comes with these events, of which I had none in my own apartment – and I was hooked. I realized I could still get a lot from listening to a writer I didn’t know. Plus, I’d walk away with about a dozen new titles for my never-ending To Read List. I promised myself that in my second year at Columbia, I would go to every single extracurricular writing chat, even if I hadn’t heard of the author.

This is how I ended up in the presence of Diane McWhorter last week. I am ashamed to admit it, but up until I saw her face on a flier in the Writing Program Office, I hadn’t heard of the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. At 7pm last Wednesday, eating a free sandwich, sipping my plastic cup of free nondescript white wine, I nodded along to Ms. McWhorter as she described her decision to write about race relations in her home city during the 1960s. Then, as I was wiping a bit of excessive mayonnaise onto my paper plate, something magical happened. One of my professors, Lis Harris, who was moderating the discussion asked Ms. McWhorter how she had evolved from a clueless, naïve, Republican girl into the flaming liberal woman that she is now, when Ms. McWhorter spoke those charmed words:

“Well, I went to Wellesley College.”

I put down my sandwich. I looked up. It was as if fairy-dust had been thrown in my free wine. Suddenly I was hanging on Ms. McWhorter’s every word, scribbling them all down in my small notebook. She talked about starting at Wellesley in 1970 at the height of the counterculture, the freaks, and the drugs. She went into detail about taking a poetry class at Wellesley with Robert Pinsky, who criticized her poems as cliché, and then about how she studied abroad in Paris and was further inspired to write by the authors who came to the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore. I pictured this woman lying on the grass in Tower Court reading a book or swimming at night in Lake Waban, long blonde hippie hair floating behind her. Just by saying that she had gone to Wellesley College, I suddenly felt I knew her better. Instinctively, I understood a part of her that, I was certain, no one else in that room got.

I was a bit disappointed when Ms. McWhorter moved on from talking about Wellesley to talking about her writing process, but the Columbia MFA student in me was happy to hear what she had to share. She talked about the experience of writing a book; how “when you’re in it, it’s hell,” a sentiment to which I could relate with my thesis. She recommended we “go ahead with life” while working on our projects, that sometimes life becomes a great inspiration. She discussed her need to use primary sources to really feel and understand the material enough to write about it vividly. She told us about her father’s reaction to his portrayal in Carry Me Home; he hadn’t realized “his life was so meaningful.” My favorite, though, was what her aunt – another Wellesley alumna – said in response: “Your father was much more interesting on the page than in real life.”

At the end of the too brief hour-and-a-half, I hovered near the front of the room, waiting for a chance to speak with Ms. McWhorter. When she finally had a moment, I told her how much I enjoyed what she had to say – discretely omitting that I had not yet read her book – and then I spoke the magic words of my own:

“I just had to tell you, I went to Wellesley too.”

“You did?” Her voice, laced with a soft southern drawl, warmed immediately. “And now you’re here? At Columbia?”

“Yes,” I replied, smiling involuntarily, “studying nonfiction writing.”

“Well good for you!” she said. We exchanged a few more words, and then Ms. McWhorter had to prepare to leave for dinner. On her way out though, I was standing in the hall talking to a friend. As she walked by, she reached out and squeezed my left shoulder.

“Good luck!” she said and smiled.

I smiled too, and then turned back to my friend. “We both went to Wellesley,” I explained. Thirty-six years between us, but still one and the same. After all, both 1974 and 2010 were purple classes.

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