In making her announcement, my instructor was wrestling to separate reflection, that fundamental element of creative nonfiction, from the task of general psychological introspection. “It’s just that last semester, I had students turning in diary entries about what jerks their boyfriends were.” “But I find writing very therapeutic,” I said. On the first day of “Introduction to Literary Nonfiction,” the instructor, a graduate student, introduced herself and made an announcement: “This class is not therapy.” Afterward, I went to her office hours in a panic. I had never heard of creative nonfiction as a literary form, though like many, I’d certainly read it and even written a bit. (With the Baby Boomers rounding that metaphorical bend, there’d be no shortage of work.) “Have you considered creative nonfiction?” my professor asked. I thought, first, about psychotherapy and then, briefly, considered becoming a funeral director. I wanted to write and think and talk about them. One day, I approached the professor and said something clumsy like, “This is what I want to do with my life.” I didn’t know quite what this was, but I knew I wanted to be engaged with the human questions of loss and grief, to acknowledge them as an essential part of being. I wrote a paper analyzing the ways in which Todd Field’s beautiful film In the Bedroom, based on Andre Dubus’s short story “Killings,” captures the differences between masculine and feminine grief. We watched Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue, Peter Weir’s Fearless, and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Maborosi. The professor had recently written a book about how she’d never properly grieved her father’s death-he had drowned when she was nine-until as an adult, she found herself sobbing at every film she attended. Amid my grief, I puzzled over how removed Americans are from death and loss.Įventually I resumed my studies, at the University of Minnesota, and enrolled in “Cinematics of Loss,” a film class offered by the English department. His was the first death I’d experienced, and it changed me irrevocably. I transferred schools before dropping out and then floated around for a while. A year and a half into my undergraduate studies, my boyfriend Matthew committed suicide, which threw a wrench into the straight line I’d envisioned my college life would follow.
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