Week 5 Reading Response

I got a lot out of the essays from Telling True Stories, especially Kelley Benham's essay about dialogue. The examples she used were so perfect. It reminded me of what Marin said last week about only using dialogue if it reveals something essential about the subject. But it also reminded me that readers need dialogue to help them connect with characters (that's one of the things that I thought was a bit lacking in Trillin's Astoria piece - there weren't very many first-hand quotes from the Flavels). As Benham says, "Dialogue is easier for people to read than straight narrative, because that's how we listen to the world and how we communicate" (105). It seems like the trick is choosing when to use it and when to paraphrase.

I really liked Tracy Kidder's "Memory." It was realistic without losing a kind of optimism and wonder at the remarkable individuals that Kidder met. It revolved around a central theme but profiled a few different people in order to get at the issue from different angles. Memory is shown to be really complicated; it's not just a piece about how sad it is when old people lose their memory.

I wasn't so crazy about Trillin's "First Family of Astoria." As Anna said, I wasn't grabbed by the historical layout in the beginning, and it took a while for me to get invested because I kept asking myself, "Why should I care about these people?" Even when I got to know the Flavels better, I still didn't care about them, because Trillin didn't give me much reason to. They didn't really seem like multi-dimensional people; instead they were a source of irritation to the town. And maybe that's the point: maybe this isn't so much a profile of the Flavels as a profile of Astoria and its obsessions. Still, I felt dissatisfied that I didn't get to know them very well except from the outside.