Welcome back to season two! In this episode of the Book Maven: A Literary Revue, Bethanne Patrick sits down with Jay Baron Nicorvo to discuss accessing trauma while writing, differing points of view of traumatic events, and how our brain sorts through traumatic experiences.
Bethanne touches on the highly anticipated Catcher in the Rye in this week’s Canon or Can it. Does she kick Holden Caulfield to the curb? Or let him stay with all of his teenage angst?
Can Bethanne beat the clock? She gives us 6 Recs for our To Be Read lists. Titles include The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, Memory Piece by Lisa Ko, Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson, Memorial by Brian Washington, Someone by Alice McDermott, and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.
Find Bethanne on X, Substack, Instagram, and Threads.
The Book Maven: A Literary Revue is hosted by Bethanne Patrick, produced by Christina McBride, and engineered by Jordan Aaron, with help from Lauren Stack.
All titles mentioned: Life B by Bethanne Patrick, Best Copy Available by Jay Baron Nicorvo, My Life by Bill Clinton, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, Running with Scissors by Augustine Burroughs, Terror Westover's Educated, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, Samantha Irby's Quietly Hostile, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and The Passion by Jeanette Winterson, Angela Carter's The Magic Toy Shop, The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan, Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant, Nevada by Imogen Binney, Jordi Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox, Lucy Santé's I Heard Her Call My Name, Before We Were Trans by Kit Hayum, In Tongues by Thomas Groton, Faltas by Cecilia Gentile, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro, Memory Piece by Lisa Ko, Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson, Memorial by Brian Washington, Someone by Alice McDermott, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley.
Episode Transcript
Welcome to season two of The Book Maven: A Literary Revue. This season, we'll talk to leading authors, dig into the classics to decide which should stay in the literary canon, and I'll recommend some of my favorite books to you. We'll have all that and more in this episode. But first, Jay Baron Nicorvo joined the show to talk about accessing trauma while writing.
Specifically, Jay talks about differing points of view of traumatic memories, the lack of ubiquity in cultural standards, and how it is that our brains sort through traumatic experiences. We get into some intense topics, so listener discretion is advised. Join us now as we talk about the final episode of MASH and how each of Jay's brothers remembers that event differently.
BP: One of the things that's fairly early in your book, I think it's in chapter one, you talk about being with your two brothers and your aunt and uncle and you're, this is the quote ‘on the couch, we are five Americans and we are doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time as 106 million other Americans. We're all tuned in together to CBS to watch the final episode of MASH’. And the reason I wanted to start out with this Jay is because it is something that I have this very specific personal memory of. And you and I know that our memories are different, but one of the things you deal with right up front in Best Copy Available is the fact that even if you and your two brothers sat and talked about this, they would have different versions, wouldn't they, of that memory?
JN: The divergence is kind of astounding. And I've talked with my brothers about what they remember of the different scenes that I'd narrate. And their point of views are wholly divergent from mine. To almost to a shocking degree. But that moment that you, that you narrate that MASH, that MASH moment, which so many Americans shared is kind of a cultural artifact. It doesn't really exist anymore. There is not this sort of unifying cultural endeavor that we all do at the same time. Those likes the scheduling has been democratized thanks to streaming and the internet and everything else. And so we're all doing those things, but we're doing them at different times. And so there was something, I think, just really. It was like a moment of an American universal and I think it felt important to capture it, but it also to work to convey some of the different themes that I was working with. Well, I mean, just your, your mention of memory. And I think all memoirs are basically about the same thing. They're all about memory and yet the narrative, the story that each individual tells in recalling those different memories is infinitely diverse and so I think I was definitely aware of that. And I was trying to keep in mind this idea of memory as being a very personal thing. But at the same time, wanting to maintain some sense that there is an objective reality that we all share, or call it whatever you will, I mean, there's a thousand different names for it, but our memories derive from a shared experience that is vast and all encompassing and like this capstone of of the MASH final episode the finale was I think something that we all shared a vast number of us shared at the same time and it was just a very vivid memory that I that and I wanted to kind of bring it into the story in part because it also gets at and foreshadows the sexual abuse that comes later on in the scene it's my uncle my beloved uncle and aunt who are babysitting us, but the reader at that point doesn't know who molested me as a child. All they know is that it was a babysitter. So I'm sort of setting up this universal American moment. And at the same time, I'm darkening it. I'm shadowing it with the potential for abuse. So I was very much aware of those things. And, and that was like one of those scenes, you know, and I'm sure you encountered this when you were working on Life B, memoirs that we write and publish, they're almost exercises in excision. I mean, the really difficult thing for me is what to leave out and to try to tell the story and to be as true to myself and my voice, but also to my family members and other people who have their own memories, to be as true as possible and not include everything, you know, it's not, you know, Life B and Best Copy Available are not My Life by Bill Clinton. Like we're not presidents. People don't want to know every single instant of our day, right? So because we're not these historical figures with, you know, cadres of historians and biographers. Pouring over every scrap of paper or every thought that we might have had, we have to really be selective in order to tell a story. And so one of the things that I do when I write is a scene or a character or a moment, it can't just be one thing. It needs to be multiple things. It needs to do a number of things at once. And so this MASH scene got at a number of things for me, and that was one of the reasons why I included it.
BP: Well, you mentioned when we were talking beforehand about my chapter called ‘Little Women’, when my younger daughter and I go to see the Greta Gerwig’s Little Women a few years back. I can't even remember exactly how many years back. And we sit down and talk afterward about her experience of growing up with me during the worst years of my double depression. And that's, you know, part of what I was doing there as well, taking a cultural moment, a moment with me and a family member and, um, turning it into something that makes that moment in my life meaningful for other people, as you said, because we're not writing autobiographies. You know, we're writing memoir, and the good part of that, even though people don't know, want to know about every time, you know, we've had a meal or written a diary entry or whatever, is that we also have creative freedom. And your book, I think, you know, I feel like such a writing baby, like such a neophyte. I wish I'd gotten closer to what we now call creative nonfiction in Life B, uh, but Best Copy Available, I think is so strongly creative nonfiction or CNF. And that is because you use not just scenes and memories, but you also use senses so well. And so, there are a couple of other chapter one moments that I want to get to, and I want to connect them a couple of pages before the MASH memory. You talk about the way that writing is memory and a book becomes a mind. And so I thought, that is so beautiful. And I wanted to hear you explain it to, you know, bring that out a little bit more, Jay.
JN: Well, you know, it's not, it's not my idea. Although, maybe those words are mine. One of the formative texts that I encountered as, I think as probably a sophomore at community college, and I don't know if it was assigned, we had to read a segment of Areopagitica that John Milton I think it was it was a delivery that he gave to to parliament and he talks about that speech in that speech, he's advocating for freedom of the press, basically, even, you know, hundreds upon hundreds of years ago, and he talks about the essence of books and that books are the essence of an individual that they do contain, you know, the purity of extraction and efficacy. And he goes on, and I can't remember the text exactly. But there was this idea that I encountered early on, and I think it was one that made me want to be a writer. Not just a reader, which is that a book sort of contained an individual, and even after that individual was gone, John Milton, you know, was hundreds of years buried, we can still glimpse inside his head. You know, and kind of rummage around in his thoughts. And so that was something that I was think that I was playing with and in memoir in that genre, you know, whether it's creative nonfiction or more like Bill Clinton's autobiography or, or the books that fall, you know, in the middle, they do, they try to, to capture a self, and for, I think, the creative nonfiction writer, for someone like me, who is schooled both in poetry and in fiction writing, published a novel, I was definitely pulling both of those elements. For poetry, it's an attention to language at the sentence level, and even smaller, right, the word and the syllable. For the novelist, it's, it's more large scale. It's the assemblage of scenes of characters moving through a setting and speaking dialogue. And so I was trying to borrow from both of those traditions to use in the memoir. And the thing that brings both of those together is fact. And I think this is a little bit different from truth. You know, we talk a little bit about our having our own truths. And I think another thing has gotten a little bit democratized in the current times is truth. We feel like we all have our own truth that we all have, you know, an entitlement to it, our experience of it. But I encountered this, this quote recently. It was like a JFK quote, and I'm going to paraphrase, but it was some, it was a speech he gave and he called the truth a tyrant. The truth is a tyrant, the only, like the only tyrant we should adhere to. And I think there's something about that that we've lost. I think we've really gotten attached to our very own personal identifiable experience and I think we've lost a little bit of touch with a kind of larger truth of reality or an experience that we all share a kind of history as it's going. And so I wanted to try to, you know, stay close to that. But at the same time, you're working in a genre memoir that demands intimacy of the utmost kind. I mean, you just have to be so focused on your individual story that sometimes I think we lose contact with the larger reality that's happening around us.
BP: You're playing right into my hands, Jay. I love this because I'm going backwards in chapter one in a way and I love one of, in one section where you're considering all of this and you're considering the case of the writer versus the reader of memoir, and you say you're at my mercy, or am I at yours?
JN: Yeah, yeah, it's definitely a give and take, you know, and I was aware that the subject that I'm dealing with, right, the book is about partly it's about my molestation as a kid, the hands of an older male babysitter, a teenager, and also my mom's violent rape. And so I'm aware as a writer that I need to make scenes and there needs to be drama and tension, and of course there's conflict in these subject matters. But also too, it's exhausting. I mean, it was exhausting for me as a writer. Devastating at times. And it's exhausting for a reader to have to sit through that. And so what you're, what you're expressing here is in part the breathing room that I tried to bring into the narrative to separate those what are really emotional and a powerful scenes with more reflective more, I don't want to say philosophical so much but more like kind of context cultural context or historical context or literary context,
BP: But you're you put in here ‘Here are scraps of John Berger I cling to. The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past.’ I'm not speaking very well while I'm reading, but ‘The past is not for living in, it goes on. It is a well of conclusions from which we draw in order to act.’ I thought, that is amazing. Because that's what we're doing. You said a few minutes ago, you know, we're digging around in this stuff. It's this well of conclusions. And we're all trying when we're writing memoir to figure out which conclusion or conclusions in the well we should pick up and turn around. And so no memoir can be the truth, no memoir is fully the truth.
JN: No, it's just a, to extend that metaphor, it's just a bucketful. It's like, if the past is the, is the well that you're drawing from, like all we have is a bucket. And so we're leaving all of this water, not just in the well, but underground, the aquifer that feeds the water, like all of that is the past. And our tool, our vessel is just, it's so minuscule. It's one book.
BP: My bucket has holes in it. I don't know about yours. But what I do know is that that is why you and all of the memoir writers I know that I truly respect and draw upon again and again, do adhere to fact as much as we can, because we can't get out the truth. We can use facts to show our own experience of the truth.
JN: Yeah, and that was really important for me, and that was one of the most difficult things for me. You know, I have a really hard time writing scene, and you'd think, like, after publishing a novel and having written three other unpublished novels, or four, I've lost track of how many novels I've finished and failed to publish, but, scene is sort of like the building block for a novel and I thought coming to a memoir It would be easier for me to write scenes and it just never is and even when I'm drafting a novel I do the same thing it comes out an exposition first and then part of what I'm doing in revising is I'm going back and then I'm sort of like teasing out the dialogue and teasing out the action and I'm putting the the characters in space And so I had to do all that for this for this memoir too, and I'm just amazed each time at how difficult that is to do just to make scenes and get readers invested in a time and a space that's really specific and, and comes back to this point that you keep making. It's those sensory details. And that's when I think they're most moving for the reader. It's not when they're just like a list of senses. But you have the characters moving in space and experiencing those senses. And that is, I think, what moves the reader most.
BP: Thank you, Jay, for joining us this week. You can find all of Jay's books wherever books are sold. Now, let's move on to Friday Reads, where we'll see what you've been reading this week.
Welcome back to another Friday Reads segment, where Sharing Friday Reads from around the socials and this season we're highlighting fewer posts, but giving you more info about the titles people are sharing. So please let us know if you like this new format. As always, my producer and engineer Jordan is here to help me through the posts that we highlight. So Jordan, what do we have this week?
JA: Up first, we've got from John who loves starting off the year with a best American collection, and they've shared a photo of the cover of the best American science fiction and fantasy of 2024.
BP: First of all, the editor of 2024's Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection is Hugh Howey. And you might know Howey as the self published author behind the phenomenally successful trilogy that started in 2011 with Wool. It's now known as the Silo Trilogy, and it's phenomenally successful. successful Apple TV series starring Rebecca Ferguson. The best of books, that's what this is, how he edited the collection, include best of short fiction, best of poetry, essays, travel, writing, more. And they're really sought after by readers because of the careful editorial curation. It allows people to discover new writers and new kinds of writing at a very high level in a very good package, I guess you could say. So I think this is terrific for any sci-fi or fantasy stan because so many of you first discovered these genres in their short forms, sometimes in magazines, sometimes in books, book collections. If you love the short stories of Arthur C. Clarke, Ted Chiang, Elizabeth Bear, Harlan Ellison, Judith Merrill, get in between the covers of this compendium. What's up next, Jordan?
JA: All right. Up next, we've got from Rob Paulk, who is reading Jeanette Winterson's The Passion on an e-reader.
BP: I really love this cover, an older one of The Passion. You've got this person wearing a fantastical tricorn hat, and that's because it's a historical novel that's set during the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. Jeanette Winterson made a huge splash in the British literary scene in 1985 with her memoir Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and that was all about her growing up as an adopted child of strict Pentecostal Christians. She came out as a lesbian and left home at 16. Her subsequent novels, short story collections, and other writings have received critical acclaim now on both sides of the Atlantic. This memoir won Britain's Whitbread Prize and it was adapted for television in 1990. It is a great read if you like Running with Scissors by Augustine Burroughs, Terror Westover's Educated, The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, even Samantha Irby's Quietly Hostile, which I love. The list could get really long. I just want to say that since this is an historical novel, but it's also somewhat absurdist, if you like it, you might also enjoy Angela Carter's The Magic Toy Shop, The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan, or Ann Patchett's The Magician's Assistant. There we go. Jordan, one more.
JA: And then finally, we've got from David Lawson, Lawson on stage. The host of the Astoria Bookshop Storytelling Show. He's holding his phone with a Friday Reads post along with a paper book of Faltas by Cecilia Gentile. And I think there's a lot going on here. Maybe, Bethanne, you can explain what's happening.
BP: Yeah, let me see if I can try to explain. So, I love this. It turns out Lawson, who often posts Friday Reads, was having an interaction with another person online and said he was looking for a funny yet dark memoir about a trans person. And the other person, Nino Cipri, said, I recommend Cecilia Gentile's, Faltas, which means flaws in Spanish. And Gentile died last year, but was a well known activist for the rights of transgender people and sex workers and just had so, so many amazing things to her credit. Faltas is subtitled ‘letters to everyone in my hometown, who isn't my rapist’. And it won the 2023 Stonewall book award. It's painful yet funny and lively. All about how community and resilience can lead to healing. Now, if you loved Nevada by Imogen Binney, Jordi Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox, Lucy Santé's I Heard Her Call My Name, Before We Were Trans by Kit Hayum, and In Tongues by Thomas Groton, you will be really interested in Faltus. There are so many other great novels and memoirs about the trans experience. I really encourage everyone to look into them and to discover more. So my thanks to David Lawson for that great. post. And that's the end of our Friday Reads posts for the week. Jordan and I will be back next time. Thank you so much for listening.
Talking to Jay, I was thinking about the way we all process traumas from our adolescent years and how we may all remember cultural experiences, like reading books in different ways. That brought up the novel we all have had to sit through, The Catcher in the Rye. Does its cultural significance earn it a place in the literary canon, or do we have to can it forever?
Did you know J. D. Salinger had only one testicle? Did you need to know J. D. Salinger had only one testicle? Some people believe that, due to his incomplete genitalia, Salinger, author of this week's title up for debate, The Catcher in the Rye, wrote the way he did because he felt incomplete.
Such literary reductionism is akin to saying Frida Kahlo painted the way she did because she had a unibrow or Beethoven's composing style was all about his hearing challenges. We humans are complex and complicated. Few of us do anything because of a single factor, and none of us knows the true origins of great artistic talent.
However, many of us, far, far too many of us, apply reductive reasoning to The Catcher in the Rye and its well known protagonist, 17 year old expelled prep school student Holden Caulfield. Wearing his red hunting hat as a sign of his radical honesty, which already places him firmly in the shallow adolescent box for me.
Holden takes a bus from Pennsylvania to Manhattan where his family lives, but checks into a hotel because he hates phonies and believes his parents are such. Allow me to gloss over young Holden's adventures for a moment because the elephant in the room, who might also be wearing a red hunting hat, is the decades long readerly over identification with this protagonist.
It points to Salinger's brilliance as a fiction writer. He's created a character who is simultaneously unlikable, an unreliable narrator, more on that shortly, and a kind of every person. The kind who, in former centuries, might have existed as an allegorical figure. I'd say he personifies callowness. But with respect for Salinger, like most of us, this author's greatest strength is also his greatest weakness.
He created such a fully realized protagonist that readers identify with Holden and miss the novel's deeper points. Holden is angry. Holden is disappointed. Holden loathes the system. Holden wants something else.
Okay, boomer! Or really, okay, greatest generation. Think about it today, Holden Caulfield would be 91 years old while other generations have been busy feeling all alienated with Holden, a few outliers among us. have been busy looking more closely at two other characters in the novel. I won't deem them minor.
The first is Holden's one time teacher, Mr. Antolini, who correctly predicts that his pupil is heading for a, quote, terrible, terrible fall, end quote. The second is Holden's younger sister, Phoebe, who, despite her tender age of 10, sees through her brother's interminable bullshit. She even corrects his misquoting of Robert Burns.
It's not, if a body catch a body coming through the rye, it's if a body meet a body coming through the rye. Phoebe, like Mr. Antolini, like, Salinger understands Holden's brittle facade will shatter eventually. Do we really need to find out Holden is bereft over his younger brother Ali's death for this to ring true?
No, we don't. Perhaps Salinger worried that Holden's crack up wasn't obvious enough from his ramblings about cliffs, timetables, suitcases, and girls. Don't worry, we figured it out from the frame device of Holden's hospitalization for a nervous breakdown. Go ahead, young people, read The Catcher in the Rye and get all ate about Holden's rizz.
But let's stop using this book in classrooms and allowing students to focus on Holden as Sigma. He's no GOAT. Holden Caulfield is confused, irrational, and unstable. He's giving basic. He's giving cringe. We have many more and better books about adolescent angst these days. I salute J. D. Salinger's prescience in recognizing that teens have feelings. But let's quickly list a few of the newer novels that might replace his, like Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, and even Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero. I say, can it, to The Catcher in the Rye and the phony focus it gives, however accidental that might be on its author's part.
I hope that's not too reductionist.
We've spent a lot of time today talking about unreliable memories. We all have memories of cultural moments, traumatic experiences, and even reading The Catcher in the Rye for the first time. Today, I wanted to take a look at six other books that touch on the unreliable nature of memories because it's a topic that is quite important given the segmentation of perceptions in our current media landscape.
BP: It's time for yet another Six Recs, our themed book lists. And as usual, we're going to see if I can give six recommendations within three minutes. Jordan, my engineer, is going to time me. And if I can't do it, you know, the big bookshelf falls over on me. This week's theme is about unreliable memories. And I think you'll enjoy these titles. Jordan, are you ready with the stopwatch?
JA: We're rolling.
BP: Thanks. The first title is The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's a 2015 fantasy novel set in an early version of medieval England. Axel and Beatrice, a married couple, like all of their neighbors, are unable to retain long term memories. So they have this dim, dim recall that they have a son and they go off on a quest to find out about him. But will they wind up separated? It's really, really special.
Next Memory Piece by Lisa Ko starts with a section about an artist named Giselle Cho in 1990s Manhattan, who spends a year documenting her memories and then burns it all.
She's kind of a performance artist. But then we go to the dystopian Manhattan of the 2040s and a young woman named Ellen has to flee from Manhattan to the Bronx. And this book is all about which memories we are allowed to have and whose memories get recorded. It's very deep stuff.
Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson is that author's 1995 debut and it's all about Ruby Lennox, her family, and the York Castle Museum. It deals with how unknown events, unknown to us, affect our lives and how we don't really get it even when we learn about them. Ultimately, I think Behind the Scenes at the Museum is about the importance of a good, strong family narrative.
Memorial by Bryan Washington was one of my favorite books a couple of years back because Washington beautifully delineates the story of a gay couple named Benson and Mike who live in Houston. Mike goes to Osaka to care for his dying father while his mother, Mitsuko, goes to Houston and she's living in the apartment with Benson. How do we remember those who are absent? How do we choose? to remember them. This is what Washington is asking. And finally, what is a fitting tribute to someone who's gone?
That's another thing that Alice McDermott is writing about in Someone, her 2013 seventh novel. It deals with a woman named Marie, starting in her childhood, all the way to her old age. But it's also about her absent brother, Gabe. Who is the someone of the title? If you do read it, consider that carefully. Let me know what you think.
Finally, I have one of my favorite books from 2024, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. It's a remarkable debut novel about time travelers. and their handlers in London, in a slightly near future London. It's a sci fi rom com, but also an incisive critique of colonialism. And who do we fight for? What should we fight for? Something to think about maybe right now.
That is my six recs for today, Jordan. How did I do this time?
JA: Well, it was a squeaker this week, but unfortunately, the bookshelf falls once again. First time in season two, three minutes and six seconds. So close.
BP: Oh, thanks. We'll see you again next time.
Well that does it for this episode of The Book Maven, a literary review. Follow us on Substack for our weekly newsletter containing new book releases, commentary, and more. Talk to you next week. The Book Maven: A Literary Revue, is hosted and produced by me, Bethanne Patrick. It's produced by Christina McBride, with engineering by Jordan Aaron, and our booking producer is Lauren Stack.
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