A Personal Anthology, by Lily Dunn

I was a writer from as early as I can remember (at around 8 I started writing novel-length stories!), but past the self-consciousness of adolescence I didn’t come back to it in any serious way until I did an MA in my 20s. It was around this time that I discovered Raymond Carver and loved his deceptively simplistic style, and how much is said through pauses and blank spaces. I also loved how often the dialogue was awkward and repetitive, but how natural it felt in that awkwardness. I could name any number of short stories that I loved, but the one I return to now is:

‘Why Don’t You Dance’ by Raymond Carver (First published in Quarterly West, 1978 and subsequently in the Paris Review, 1981. Collected in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Knopf, 1981, and Where I’m Calling From, Atlantic, 1988)

It’s interesting to read it again now knowing what I know. So many of his stories were about drinking and alcoholics, with a subtext of crisis. In this particular story, there is a steady mood of provocation, in the furniture out in the yard, the main character challenging the young couple and getting them drunk, dancing with the young girl, and the hold he has over her and her inability to admit to it. How it lingers and stays with her beyond the page.

Carver introduced me to the other minimalist writers of that time: to Hemingway, and Cheever. I have often used

‘Hills Like White Elephants’ by Ernest Hemingway (First published August, 1927 in Transition, then later in a short story collection, Men Without Women, Charles Scribner and Son, 1927)  

as a good example of dialogue and what is left unsaid. The tragic decision between the couple is not spoken of but it saturates their every word and their every move; and of course, again, alcohol plays centre stage, the beers on the table, the brand Anis del Toro painted on the bead curtain, which acts as a distraction from the painful emotional conundrum the couple are in.

‘Reunion’ by John Cheever (First published 27th October 1962 in the New Yorker, and later collected in The Stories of John Cheever, Knopf, 1978)

is a spectacular short, short story in how it shows a whole life between this bullying man and his son in so few pages. Again, it involves alcohol, but it also absolutely nails that ambivalence a boy feels towards his father, desperate to be recognised and to be loved, in admiration but also shame. And how he sees himself reflected in his father’s behaviour – “as soon as I saw him, I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom.” But instead of spending quality time together, his father proceeds to bully each waiting staff in each of the four places they go to attempt to have a drink, in a feeble attempt to project his authority – is this because in classic narcissistic style he is filling the void of his inadequacy? Or as a deflection from the difficult stuff, having a frank correspondence with his son? It is full of a sad acknowledgement, a coming-of-age tale of desperation.

Looking back now on these stories and why I was drawn to them, it feels like an odd premonition, as if I knew in some part of me where my father would end up.

Six months after my daughter was born, my father died alone on the floor of a B&B in Ilfracombe having lost his wife, his business, home, and been deported back from San Francisco where he had been living for the past 20 years. He was an alcoholic, but had only been drinking for ten years or so. After he died and I had my second child I fell into a wild kind of depression and had repeated fantasies of escape, running from my life which suddenly felt like a trap. I was isolated, yes, at home with my children, but I was also grieving. Each night after the children’s bath, I would sing them to sleep and I always sang the same song:

‘All I Want’ by Joni Mitchell (From the album Blue, Reprise Records, 1971)

“I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, looking for something what can it be?”

When they were a little older, I snuck away from them and my husband for a week’s writing residential in a stately home in Ireland. On the last night a friend threw a dinner party in her apartment and another writer got out his guitar and I sang this song to a room full of strangers. When I stood to top up my glass, my new friend said to me, “Maybe you need to find a different song to sing to your children from now on.”

I was consumed with loss, and with the tragedy of addiction, how it had claimed my father so quickly, and the literature and music I surrounded myself with at this time reflects that. A few poems I was struck by were,

‘The Wreck’ by Don Paterson (Published in White Lie: New and Selected Poetry, Graywolf, 2001 and available to read online at the Poetry Foundation website)

“…the bull-black, deadweight wines that we swung/towards each other rang and rang/like bells of blood, our own great hearts./We slung the drunk boat out of port/and watched our sober unreal life/unmoor, a continent of grief;…” 

The heavy weight, the desperate sadness of that unmoored state, the ‘unreal life’ believed in.

When I was in the car with my children, I listened to songs on repeat, my favourite being:

‘Troublesome Houses’ by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and the Cairo Gang (From the album The Wonder Show of the World, Drag City, 2010)

I imagined the troublesome houses were places to go and drink, but I think they are more likely a brothel. “She said, when I got home to leave her alone. She could taste trouble on my mouth.” For me this song captures the love and repulsion of addiction, - “the deadweight wines that we swung” What a grip it has on the body and the heart: “I couldn’t withstand the glorious day without seeing those troublesome faces.” He wants to stop but he also can’t.

When my world started to fall apart, my husband and I facing separation, I grasped at doing something good, and took on voluntary work at Hackney Recovery Service, in affiliation with St Mungo’s, teaching alcoholics in recovery. I cycled there each week as if my life depended on it. I took them this poem,

‘Garden’ by Sam Willets (From New Lights for the Old Dark, Cape Poetry, 2010)

And they loved it so much they printed it out, framed it and hung it on the wall in the waiting area. “Look at your life,/to your one given garden.”

Sam Willets was a heroin addict for ten years and this collection is full of the pain and contradiction of that state, with the urgency of something that demands to be written. This poem held a lot of resonance for me too, as it felt as if I was also in recovery. I was trying to reclaim myself.

‘Under the Influence’ by Scott Russell Sanders (First published in Harper’s, November 1989, and available to subscribers to read here. Collected in Secrets of the Universe, Beacon Press, 1991 and in The Art of the Personal Essay, edited by Phillip Lopate, Anchor Books, 1995)

This so perfectly captures the experience of being the child of an alcoholic, and is an expert example of a personal essay. Sanders is a master craftsman and brilliantly demonstrates the flexibility of the form in his switching between time frames throughout, both in the mind and emotion of the child and the perspective of the man, still under the influence of his father’s illness even years after his father’s death. I often teach with this essay as it is an exquisite example of creative nonfiction and it encapsulates why I fell in love with this form.

By the time my husband and I had separated, I was doing a PhD and immersing myself in reading memoir and personal essays, and one of my early inspirations was Alice Walker’s short personal essay, ‘Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self’, (First published In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983)

This is not about alcoholism but it’s about self realisation and self forgiveness after a lifetime of constantly ‘looking down’ after a terrible accident when Alice lost sight in one eye. And it’s a beautiful example of the playfulness of creative nonfiction, when she throws a poem right at its centre.

‘Inventory of a Haunted House, No.1’ by Bruce Owens Grimm (First published on Ghost City Press, February 2020, and available to read online here)

Once I had discovered creative nonfiction I couldn’t get enough of it, and the many variations in the definition of an essay. There is nothing straight and binary about it. The best writers of memoir are expert at taking great leaps in the imagination, of writing through metaphor and finding ways of simultaneously concealing and revealing. I love the sense of the past ghosts in this essay, and its lyrical quality. That the narrator is both in Target and also with the ghosts of his past, and his own struggle with alcoholism.

‘The Love of My Life’ by Cheryl Strayed (First published in the journal The Sun, 2002, and available to read online here)

This is personal essay at its strongest and most powerful. I love how Cheryl Strayed lays herself bare, so brave to lean into the tensions within all of us – the difficult self-delusory spaces when we are in a state of crisis. She is deep in grief but only really grasps it as the essay progresses; but it manifests itself in her infidelity and hurting others.

Lastly, a short story that my friend and work partner, Zoe Gilbert, brought to a creative writing session we taught together:

‘The Story of an Hour’ by Kate Chopin (First published in Vogue on Dec 6, 1894, as ‘The Dream of an Hour’, and widely collected, including in The Awakening and Selected Stories, Penguin Classics, 2003)

Zoe read this aloud in class and I closed my eyes and felt the liberation Mrs Mallard felt at the news of her husband’s death, her sudden freedom from the constraints of her life as his wife. I love how this realisation bursts forth as if it is a part of herself she had not really met before.

“There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.”

The emotional truth of this feels profound and surprising for a story written and published in the 19th Century. I was disappointed with the ending, although I suspect this short story wouldn’t have been published at the time without her having to suffer for the rush of liberation she felt. We have made great strides in so many respects, but sometimes it feels as if there has been no progress at all.

Dr Lily Dunn is an author, mentor and academic. Her debut nonfiction, Sins of My Father: A Daughter, A Cult, A Wild Unravelling, a memoir about the legacy of her father’s addictions (W&N) was The Spectator and The Guardian Best Nonfiction Book, 2022. Her forthcoming book: Into Being: The radical craft of memoir and its power to transform is due to be published by MUP in 2025. She is also author of a work of fiction, Shadowing the Sun (Portobello Books, 2007), and co-editor of A Wild and Precious Life (Unbound, 2021), an anthology of stories on recovery from mental illness and addiction. She teaches narrative nonfiction and memoir at Bath Spa University and co-runs London Lit Lab.

* You can browse the full searchable archives of A Personal Anthology, with over 2,700 story recommendations, at www.apersonalanthology.com. 

* A Personal Anthology is curated by Jonathan Gibbs, author of two novels, Randall, and The Large Door, and a book-length poem, Spring Journal. He is Programme Director of the MA/MFA Creative Writing at City, University of London.

* And if you are interested in contributing your own Personal Anthology to the project, then please let me know by replying to this email. I’m always on the lookout for guest editors!

* Finally, if you enjoy this Substack you might enjoy Creative Digest, a new Substack originating from the Creative Writing team at City, and to which I contribute. Read the first six issues and subscribe here.