The Iowa Writers' Workshop is the only university-based organization to be honored with the National Humanities Medal and, as the nation's first creative writing degree program, has become the model for similar writing programs across the country. Graduates of the two-year residency program at the University of Iowa have won 17 Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other literary awards. The long list of notable alumni no doubt includes authors whose work is on your bookshelf: Michael Cunningham, Kim Edwards, Adam Haslett, John Irving, Ann Patchett, Jane Smiley, Wallace Stegner, John Edgar Wideman, just to name a few.
You get the picture.
So I pick up this memoir, knowing about the program's reputation but not knowing the author, Tom Grimes, or its subject, Frank Conroy, who directed the workshop for 18 years and died in 2005.
Understand, the memoir is one of my favorite literary genres; there's no question it brings you up close and personal with the writer and often takes you deep inside an unfamiliar culture or set of formative experiences. But it also can have its flaws as an inherently biased (or perhaps incomplete) point of view, since it is, after all, one person's version of events. How truthful the writer is determines the memoir's credibility. It's not just what the writer says but also what he or she omits.
That said, I'll say I appreciated this memoir for its literary qualities. Grimes, the author of five books and director of the creative writing program at Texas State University in San Marcos, obviously knows how to write a sentence, how to construct a scene, how to draw meaning from an event or conversation. He is insightful and candid about his insecurities, bordering on the irrational. But he's also a little too adoring of his subject (at times uncomfortably so), too quick to draw parallels between his life and Conroy's, though respectful of the gaps in accomplishment and recognition between himself and his mentor.
Grimes as a young man was an aspiring writer working as a waiter in Florida when Conroy rescued him by choosing him for the Iowa Writers' Workshop. The older man nurtured him, singling him out for attention even as he seemed to ignore other students, and became his friend and a father figure, even inviting him to live in his house during summers when Conroy and his wife vacationed in Nantucket.
The deeper I got into the book, the less I liked the two main characters, with Grimes appearing to fawn over his mentor, seemingly unable to submit a manuscript or make a career move without Conroy's blessing or, worse, opening a door for him.
To his credit, Grimes is incredibly forthright about all this. And I have to say, the final third did redeem the book as Grimes reflects on what he has learned about himself.
"Every great novel, it's been said, is a 'long story with a flaw in it.' Well, I've mastered the flaws and have diligently produced long stories to contain them. But something all along was missing -- me. And this book redresses that absence. For twenty years, I believed Frank filled that absence. But he didn't; my idolization of him did; moreover, my fictionalizing of him did. Frank is the protagonist of my best novel, and my best novel is this memoir. In the end, my memoir about Frank is a memoir about me. By writing about Frank, I could no longer turn away from myself, which is what I've done all of my life. Now, I'm gazing at myself."That's a pretty piece of writing. As is this passage, which strikes me as absolutely true:
"While writing this memoir, I believed I knew Frank completely. The illusion was necessary. But the truth is: like all of us, Frank was a mosaic. We know a person not only by what we observe and what he or she says or tells us but also by what we infer, imagine, and are told by others. Toward the end of his life, the latter is how I knew Frank."The book ends with Grimes' eulogy for his friend, a succinct and welcome note of grace.
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