Lee Gutkind

I stopped subscribing to Lee Gutkind's "Creative Nonfiction" a few years ago. The issues often began with his ongoing defense of the genre, a tedious and unnecessary argument. Just let the writing speak for itself, I thought. The magic of a perfectly constructed first sentence is the only advocacy that good writing needs, regardless of the genre.

In "Same Time Next Week," Gutkind steps back and gives the writing room to triumph. Skip the "Drama, in Real Life!" short introductions to each show more piece, and the stories themselves will teach you how people with mental illness struggle and heal. Years after the shock of my husband's diagnosis of bipolar disorder and recently being broadsided by my teenage daughter's bout with depression, I found reassurance in the writers' validation that, yes, people with mental illness heal, work and even write with a creative insight that we often don't acknowledge is possible for people whose minds have turned against them.

The catalog of mental illness is all here: parental negligence, a mental health system that is sometimes inadequate and always overtaxed, patients that are lost in their self-absorption, and the battle to find treatment when no one solution works for everyone.

What is sometimes missing is the family's perspective and the understanding that we are often part of the cure, not the cause. Mental illness's biological component doesn't limit itself to children whose mothers ignored them. It can take over abruptly in normal families, to those of us who least expect it.

The most important sentence in the book is, in fact, its last, when Ella Wilson writes that, after finding the right therapist, she "came down a person." With mental illness, it's easy to believe that life will never be normal again, but it often is, with the mundane happiness of just being recognized as a person instead of the embodiment of an illness. show less

It's rare that an editor's introduction gets me seriously psyched to read a collection, but Lee Gutkind's gave me a whole new appreciation for creative nonfiction. In fact it's probably the best introduction I've ever read. It's the only one that really stands out in my memory, and if the introduction is that good the collection has to be good. I wasn't disappointed.

I had a writing professor who threw those words around a lot- "creative nonfiction" - but I was never sure what she meant. show more What's the difference between nonfiction and CREATIVE nonfiction?

This collection is smart, funny, poignant, and poetic. Nonfiction poetic? Yes. The advance-reading collection starts with a bitter memoir piece about the lasting bond of hate between mother and daughter, and moves directly to an philosophical essay on life written in an experimental style as a final exam. The travel story on walking across Andorra is written as a satire about how to write a travel story. A blog about watching one's mother suffer from Alzheimer's is written in a fragmented, poetic style. There is an especially caustic eulogy for the "N-word." Another blogger rips Facebook while admitting that he has been sucked into the networking culture. This is creative nonfiction.

The collection also includes more conventional nonfiction pieces. "Moby-Duck" seems to be the centerpiece, and like the novel to which the title alludes, it is a sprawling epic, mixing research, memoir, and environmental worries. "Figurines" deals with a mixed-race marriage and those little uncomfortable reminders of race relations in America, like decorative wooden figures of stereotyped African-Americans from southern days gone by. A journalistic article examines the likely murder of a nineteen-year-old, who was found in an alley beneath a nine-story parking deck; the police ruled it a suicide. "The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex" is a interesting mini-biography of the man who authored the 1970's bestseller, The Joy of Sex.

My favorite of the collection is "Cracking Open," an intense and beautifully written narrative of a young Polish woman who gives birth to a damaged son on her kitchen table in the 1960s. The mother agonizes as her child is prodded and studied by doctors and medical students. She is escorted out of the hospital after visiting hours on a regular basis. He suffers numerous operations; one leaves him in a body cast with a hole in the side for his urine to drain (his ureter has been closed). Flies are attracted to the hole. She is told he will not reach his first birthday, and then she is told that he will not make it past puberty. Yet, she hopes and endures.

Overall, it's a great collection. The range of material and style is surprising. Several exciting new voices are presented, and the collection demonstrates that blogs have the potential to be good literature. One or two shorter pieces were dry and mediocre, but the good outweighs the bad. I look forward to volume 3. show less

I'm a nurse so I can only imagine that I read this book very differently than non-nurses. I'm also a relatively new nurse, so I empathize more with the new nursing stories and still aspire to be able to look back on a career full of accumulated wisdom. Regardless, this collection is worth reading - it won't have any revelations for a nurse, but it might for others, and it contains great storytelling regardless. I very much enjoyed it, although - as in any anthology - some writing styles show more appealed more to me than others.

I also think the editor needs to spend more time paying attention to nurses when he gets healthcare, because saying in the forward that he's never noticed nurses much says more about him than nurses, to me. show less

There is a slow, careful nature to the first stories in"True Crime" that sets the tone for a collection that is not lurid, though often deeply disturbing. Instead of merely being a recounting of terrible violence, this book a reflection on crime and criminals, how these touch an individual and form him or her in ways unimaginable, what they say about human nature.
Once I came to the middle of "True Crime" I had a very difficult time setting it aside. The writing is, for the most part, very show more good, and the stories are compelling. I could not stop thinking about two of them: a young gang member murdered by two men, one of whom was his best friend, and a husband who killed his pregnant wife and two young children. The writing for these is exceptionally good, providing just enough information that you understand how the crime came to be committed - but no easy and obvious answers and explanations, because there are none.
I thought for a long time after finishing these stories - about human nature, about that moment when a person decides he's going to commit a crime, about how we think about violence and the way in which a violent death affects not only the family members and close friends but everyone who is touched by it, who knew the victims or the perpetrator. All readers will do a lot of reflecting too, I'm sure.
All the stories here are good, but not all are remarkable; I found myself skimming only one, a rather curious essay that begins with the infamous Mike Tyson ear-biting incident.
My greatest objection was to the lack of photos. Readers are immersed so intensely in an incident, yet provided with no images to connect with the stories. show less