Notes in the Margin Weblog

Nova Scotia News - TheChronicleHerald.ca:

In Nova Scotia’s The Chronicle Herald, Judith Meyrick reviews Magic Island: The Fictions of L. M. Montgomery by Elizabeth Waterston. Montgomery was the author of Anne of Green Gables and several subsequent best-selling novels.

Montgomery kept journals and scrapbooks passionately and meticulously, preserving for us a picture of her daily life and the times she lived in. She was hugely talented and wrote obsessively, through good times and bad, occasionally using her writing as “therapy,” however unwittingly. She suffered through depression, the loss of her second son and the sometimes extreme mental distress of her husband. Through it all, she kept writing.

According to Waterson, Montgomery used writing as therapy. She suffered periods of depression throughout her life but used her own misery to develop powerful characters: “She found it possible to neutralize her miserable thoughts about herself by giving some of her worst traits to characters in her books and making light of them.”

In ‘Bright Shiny Morning,’ James Frey Presents Little Pieces of Los Angeles in His Way - New York Times

New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin writes about James Frey’s new novel:

He got a second act. He got another chance. Look what he did with it. He stepped up to the plate and hit one out of the park. No more lying, no more melodrama, still run-on sentences still funny punctuation but so what. He became a furiously good storyteller this time.

He wrote a big book. He wrote about a city. Los Angeles. He made up a lot of characters, high low rich poor lucky not, every kind, the book threw them together. It was random but smart.

Yes, this is that James Frey, the one who published a memoir called A Million Little Pieces and was later vilified in the press and in front of millions of viewers on the Oprah show for making much of it up.

This time he’s made it all up and rightly called it fiction.