When people tell me they’ve read 1984 or Animal Farm, I can’t shut up…I end up rattling on about Homage to Catalonia (my favorite) or Down and Out in Paris and London, or his many, many essays. Sigh. What I most admire about him is his thoughtfulness, his ability to re-see his own positions, to interrogate his politics. And his sweet melancholy mixed with a dogged desire to keep seeing and creating relevant beauty in the face of the 20th Century and the horror it brought.

This is the only talk on the craft of writing that’s brought me to tears. Skloot talked about the writing process for putting together his essay, “Kismet,” which dealt with the death of his brother. Twenty years ago, Skloot suffered a virus attack that resulted in brain lesions that damaged large sections of his memory and hindered his ability to process information. Despite this major obstacle he has continued a productive writing career. He spoke in this craft talk about the organic structure of the essay, a piece of seven sections that explore interlocking themes. One of his major points was the organic structure that resulted from the essay’s subject matter. He traced the evolution of the essay by guiding the audience through the insights and emotions that occurred after his brother’s death; since he had lost access to much of his childhood memories, he had to pay careful attention to any emotional triggers signaling a buried memory or association about his brother.

Although most of us don’t suffer brain damage, we confront the desire to overstructure our emotions, reactions, and memories, fitting them into a form that seems to us to make “sense.” Some of the most beautiful quotes shared by Skloot concerned his gratitude at having the process of writing nonfiction as a framework for reconstructing his sense of self:
“You get to say in the essay what you never say to others, what you never say to yourself.”
He also described writing as a “spiritual practice”: “You open yourself up and slow yourself down. Once you lose control and surrender to the material, you open the vents and other material can stream in. This requires a looser and more exploratory mode of working. It requires time and patience, a willingness to explore tangents, a willingness to be ruthless with the tangents.”

From p. 81:
“The time for it is always with us though we say we do not have that kind of time. The kind of time I have is not for this but for that. I wish I had that kind of time. But if you had that kind of time, would you do it? Would you give it a try? This kind of doing both takes and gives time–makes live the dead hours inside us.”

And from p. 133 (On the evil questions inside your head, “Is it Good?” “Does this suck?”): “Give up because it’s hopeless. Make useless pictures. Waste time and materials. Have no purpose. Betray the pimps.”

I talked about my book, Opa Nobody, and about research and family. And I noticed that as I talked to Rachael and heard her lovely Minnesooota accent I began to sound very Midwestern myself.

See if you can pick up on those vowels, ya know?

Revolutions, notoriously, devour their children: Once-beloved radicals are beheaded at the guillotine. But for the actual children of revolutionaries and activists, this idea holds a whole other dimension of meaning. For them, politics extracts a personal cost. Deep down, they suspect they come second to the cause.

For Sonya Huber, daughter of a German immigrant and author of the memoir “Opa Nobody,” this conflict gnaws at her family. Her grandfather Heina’s commitment to socialist and antifascist politics in prewar and Nazi Germany demanded sacrifices from his wife and children, even as he fought on behalf of the proletariat. For his efforts, he earned the title of the family “nobody.

Growing up, Huber heard about her grandfather’s activism, but she never knew the full story. When her own commitment to leftist politics led to emotional and physical collapse, she sought inspiration in his example. She wanted to know, “Why try to change the world?” She listened to family stories, and when those ran dry she crossed the Atlantic to search through German historical archives. In every chapter, she weaves stories of her activist life with richly imagined scenes of her grandfather, reconstructing his life from anecdotes and documentary evidence.

Huber also confronts links to Nazism in her own bloodline — in the person of a great uncle who joined the Waffen-SS. Although she has no evidence that he took part in war crimes, she imag- ines him participating in atrocities nonetheless. It would be too easy, Huber writes, not to do so, to acquit him simply because the paper trail ends. His SS status, in other words, makes him complicit, regardless of what he did or did not do. At the same time, Huber frames his decision to join the SS as fraught with nuance — perhaps as a survival strategy. And yet, she admits, such a “survival strategy” is her own invention, an expression of her hopes as opposed to the “truth.”

Huber is always careful to explain where research ends and imagination begins. Amid recent scandals about fraudulent memoirs, her honesty is profound in what it implies about storytelling and genre. Read as the saga of her quest to balance activism and motherhood, “Opa Nobody” is a memoir; read as a biography of her grandfather, it becomes speculative nonfiction. At times, it feels like a historical account. Her own label of “nonfiction novel” suits it well, but it is more than that. By connecting with history on such a personal level, she reveals how ordinary citizens can get swept up into movements of all kinds; allegiance is never as simple as a membership card.

Most radically of all for a progressive activist, Huber embraces the past. Instead of tossing it all out in search of something new, she ties a firm knot between then and now.
Karrie Higgins is a writer based in Portland, Ore.

When pestered with questions, memory is like an onion that wishes to be peeled so we can read what is laid bare letter by letter. It is seldom unambiguous and often in mirror-writing or otherwise disguised.

Beneath its dry and crackly outer skin we find another, more moist layer, that once detached, reveals a third, beneath which a fourth and a fifth wait whispering. And each skin sweats words too long muffled, and curlicue signs, as if a mystery-monger from an early age, while the onion was still germinating, had decided to encode himself.

Then ambition raises its head: this scrawl must be deciphered, that code cracked. What currently insists on truth is disproved, because Lie or her younger sister, Deception, often hands over only the most acceptable part of a memory, the part that sounds plausible on paper, and vaunts details to be as precise as a photograph…” (3)

Beautiful words and a lovely metaphor. I wanted so much to love this book. I love this author, and the subject matter of German memory, history and literature are some of my favorites. With a beginning like this, I expected a German version of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory…and somehow I am disappointed. Starts strong, finishes with no resolution.