The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

I’m not describing a presence, I’m describing an absence

In nonfiction the reader must believe that the narrator is speaking truth

She realizes suddenly that what she’s been calling experience is only raw material

Because the narrator knew who was speaking, she always knew why she was speaking

The speaker’s effort to recall with exactness how things had been between herself and the dead woman—her open need to make sense of a strong but vexing relationship—had caused her to say so much that I became aware at last of all that was not being said; that which could never be said. I felt acutely the warm, painful inadequacy of human relations. This feeling resonated in me. It was the resonance that had lingered on, exactly as it does when the last page is turned of a book that reaches the heart

moved me to that melancholy evocation of world-and-self that makes a single person’s death feel large

Repeatedly it was said by colleagues, patients, activists in health care reform that the doctor had been tough, humane, brilliant; stimulating and dominant; a stern teacher, a dynamite researcher, an astonishing listener