Don’t Explain by Lisa Zeiger

This is a reflection on a memoir I spent four years writing and rewriting. By the time it was done, I had changed almost every word. My book became what cooks call a reduction; a broth simmered, sieved, and steaming. It fills only a saucepan; in book-speak it is a “slender volume.”

The ineluctable bromide of editors and their marketing departments is the mantra “narrative arc”. My memoir had none, but I made up for it with unassailable sentences transmitting hard-won sense. For I am unshakably an essayist, a genre I own like the nose on my face. From fifteen to forty I read at least a thousand novels, but from them I learned only how to structure a sentence; never a plot. The latter is a gift I simply don’t possess, nor do I care to. If reading is urged onward by plot, writing is impelled by language, pure and impure.