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The Making of a Writer
Gail Godwin
Journals, 1961-1963
Random House
January 2006
352 pages
ISBN: 1400064325
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
Gail Godwin was twenty-four years old and working as a
waitress in the North Carolina mountains when she wrote: “I
want to be everybody who is great; I want to create
everything that has ever been created.” It is a declaration
that only a wildly ambitious young writer would make in the
privacy of her journal. In the heady days of her literary
apprenticeship, Godwin kept a daily chronicle of her dreams
and desires, her travels, love affairs, struggles, and
breakthroughs. Now, at the urging of her friend Joyce Carol
Oates, Godwin has distilled these early journals, which run
from 1961 to 1963, to their brilliant and charming essence. The Making of a Writer opens during the feverish period
following the breakup of Godwin’s first marriage and her
stint as a reporter for The Miami Herald. Aware that she is
entering one of the great turning points of her life as she
prepares to move to Europe, Godwin writes of the “100
different hungers” that consume her on the eve of departure.
A whirlwind trip to New York, the passengers and their
stories on board the SS Oklahoma, the shock of her first
encounters with Danish customs (and Danish men)–Godwin
wonderfully conveys the excitement of a writer embracing a
welter of new experience. After a long, dark Scandinavian winter and a gloriously
romantic interlude in the Canary Islands, Godwin moves to
London and embarks on the passionate engagements that will
inspire some of her finest stories. She records the
pleasures of soaking in the human drama on long rambles
through the London streets–and the torment of lonely Sundays
spent wrestling these impressions into prose. She shares her
passion for Henry James, Marcel Proust, Lawrence Durrell,
Thomas Wolfe–and her terror of facing twenty-six with
nothing to show but a rejected novel and a stack of debts. “I do not feel like a failure,” Godwin insists as she sits
down yet again to the empty page. “I will keep writing,
harder than ever.” Like Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, Gail Godwin’s
journals brim with the urgency and wit of a brilliant
literary mind meeting the world head on. An inspired and
inspiring volume, The Making of a Writer opens a shining
window into the life and craft of a great writer just coming
into her own.
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