Walter Kirn
Walter Kirn
Walter Kirn is an American novelist, literary critic, and essayist. He is the author of eight books, most notably Up in the Air, which was made into a movie starring George Clooney...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
adaptation almost assigned book cards deck though works
Here's how adaptation works - almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it's as though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into jacks, and some of the jacks have been made into twos.
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One of the saddest things about publishing is how quickly it ages what it touches. The frenzy involved in getting books on shelves, and in putting the word out that they're there, moves at a speed that is not the speed of writing, let alone of reading.
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I review books as a day job, and through the years I've come to view the contemporary memoir as, almost always, a saga of victimization, sometimes by others, sometimes by the self, and sometimes by illness or misfortune, leading, like clockwork, to healing and redemption.
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According to the perverse aesthetics of artistic guilty pleasure, certain books and movies are so bad - so crudely conceived, despicably motivated and atrociously executed - that they're actually rather good.
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Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.
book memorable popcorn
I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn - small, tasty delights - and I like to gorge on them now and then.
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I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping.
above thoughts
I wasn't above having thoughts of God's wrath.
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Literally, while I was writing, the town eccentrics were looking over my shoulder, asking about what I was writing, listening to my explanations, offering their two cents. It had gotten around town pretty quickly that what Walter was doing inside his house could be viewed easily on a computer. I thought, 'This is more interactivity than I can stand!' But it was interesting too.
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She started out all excited and impressed. ... (She took an immediate dislike to Bill, who struck her as a narcissistic snake.)
failed hoped stories
Short stories are fiction's R & D department, and failed or less-than-conclusive experiments are not just to be expected but to be hoped for.
trying upset
because she was very upset and I was trying to do the gentlemanly thing.
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What should be, is.' As my grandmother explained it to our family the winter she lost three fingertips to frostbite when the furnace in her little house broke and she fell and cracked a hip while trying to light it, 'Accepting life's imperfections is not the secret. The secret, dears, is to understand life has none. How could it? We've got nothing to compare it to. We can dream something up, of course- some pretty maybe life where fingers are very hard and indestructible- but that's pure mischief, darlings. Fingers freeze. It's one of the things they like to do sometimes.
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Cross the wrong state border with your gun, or wake up one morning to new legislation or a new presidential executive order, and suddenly you're the bad guy, not the good guy. No wonder some gun owners seem so touchy; they feel, at some level, like criminals in waiting.