JCW: A Book Club for Writers

Many stories feature a narrator who is reaching far into their past to reassemble feelings and impressions of the person they were when the events of the story took place. Sometimes the perspective is from many years back, a lifetime. When it is commonly
understood that memory is flawed, if not mostly fabricated, how is the reader to trust the narrator’s authenticity? Does a story that looks decades into the past render the narrator unreliable?

Of course it does, but is that a bad thing? We are reading fiction after all.

Fiction calls for an author to create reality, and for the reader to trust the author to deliver on that responsibility. Just as we trust our own recollections of the past, to an extent that we may swear to them, we hand over license to a narrator to recount the events of their distant past and trust that their efforts will elicit a worthwhile experience.In doing so, the narrator is creating their present self and projecting what that consciousness would want to believe of their past self.

In So Long, See You Tomorrow, author William Maxwell gives the reader a narrator who is recreating the story of a childhood friend from memories, newspaper articles, and imagination with a result that is more than convincing. It is genuinely poignant.

In The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes renders a narrator who is reinhabiting a time of his life when coming of age and delves into formative experiences, revealing uncomfortable truths beneath decades of self-deception.

Both novels are the subjects of this month’s book club. I hope you will read at least one of them and take part in the discussion that will focus on the role memory plays in certain stories, and how as writers we can draw upon the sometimes confounding, always prosaic characteristics of memory in fiction writing.

June's Theme: The Weight of Memory

• The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (163 pages)
• So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (160 pages)

Both novels explore how memory reshapes the past and how narrators revise their own lives.

Discussion:

• Retrospective narration
• Unreliable memory
• Narrative revelation

Joshua Tedeschi is a native Jersey City visual artist and writer working on his first novel. He writes literary fiction and urban-themed short poetry that probe everyday relationships and tensions for broader meaning. His writing appears on Substack and Instagram under his pseudonym Julius Germans (@juliusgermans).

John Schneider is a teacher and writer from New Jersey. He reviews small and independent press fiction on Substack (@johnwschneider)