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Marisa Silver’s latest novel, At Last, weaves together the life stories of two women whose paths entwine because their children marry. Below, the author of Mary Coin, Little Nothing, The Mysteries, and Babe in Paradise recommends six other “whole life” narratives.
‘Stoner’ by John Williams (1965)
Something I love about the “whole life” novel is how it can dignify the ordinary by suggesting that the simple act of living from one end to the other is an epic feat. John Williams writes straight to the heart of the yearnings, faults, and disillusionments of an unheroic man in this brilliant and shattering novel. Buy it here.
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‘The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman’ by Ernest J. Gaines (1971)
A narrative of a lifetime inevitably tells the story of the era during which that life is lived. I love this novel, written as an oral history of its protagonist, for the way it elegantly braids historic events with the intimate story of a life. Buy it here.
‘Atonement’ by Ian McEwan (2001)
The thrill of this novel’s metafictional conceit is more than matched by its emotional power. We watch protagonist Briony grow from a passionate and creative little girl into an older writer riven by guilt. McEwan’s novel overall project is a complex investigation into why we make fiction and why we believe in it. Buy it here.
‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid (1978)
This is a short story, and it’s very short: one long 650-word sentence. Although it is nominally about an Anti-guan mother giving her daughter a set of rules to live by so she can survive her racist and misogynistic world, it is also the unspoken story of the mother’s life, a woman who has experienced the very things she warns her daughter about. Buy it here.
‘The Copenhagen Trilogy’ by Tove Ditlevsen (1967–71)
This is a memoir of (not quite) a whole life that underscores something that fascinates me, which is that while we often attach meaning to the story of a life seen in retrospect, we live moment to moment without that sense of meaning. Ditlevsen’s trilogy captures this randomness perfectly. Buy it here.
‘An Artist of the Floating World’ by Kazuo Ishiguro (1986)
The lead character here—a painter who makes propaganda art for Japan during World War II and is ostracized after—is one of Ishiguro’s masterful creations, a man whose efforts to live at a distance from the truth illustrate Japanese social and political history. Buy it here.
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