Cara Spitalewitz reviews a new collection of essays, "My Heart is an Idiot" by Davy Rothbart, founder of Found magazine, which collects "anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life":
It can be hard to remember, but it wasn't that long ago—just a little over a decade—that glimpses into other people's lives, like those provided by Found and Rothbart's essays, were novel. These days, social media provide us with far more glimpses than we care to see. As Rothbart points out in an essay about a bus trip he took from Michigan to New York in the wake of the September 11 attacks, times have changed: "these days…I would've gathered a slew of email addresses and made a dozen new Facebook friends. But that was another time, before the souls we crossed paths with could be collected like passport stamps."
You can read an excerpt from Rothbart's collection here. Jessica Freeman-Slade thinks Rothbart has missed the mark, noting that "it takes more than experience to make a narrative voice, and not every failure or triumph should be destined for memoirization":
The impulse to memoirize isn’t a bad one, even on the part of the young and reckless — I’ve spent hours on end devouring the first season of Girls and underlining sentence after sentence of Sheila Heti’s extraordinary How Should a Person Be? What makes stories worth telling is not what happened, but how what happened made something else happen to the teller. And the true stories that we remember — from the Burroughs, the Karrs, the Nabokovs and Rakoffs of the world — didn’t just serve up the events of their day planner or black book. They spun them into glittering tales of experience. "I needed a cover story," Rothbart said in "Shade," and you can see it in every story in this collection, each essay that yearns to be "collection-worthy."
(Found object via Flickr user FINDS!!!)
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