Wally Lamb...The Author and His Works
TV ClubHouse: archive: Library - Miscellaneous thru May 2003:
Wally Lamb...The Author and His Works
Aunt_Bob | Sunday, March 02, 2003 - 12:34 pm     Wally Lamb is the beloved author of She's Come Undone and I know This Much Is True. Both books were Oprah's Book Club selections and #1 New York Times bestsellers. Lamb is the volunteer facilitator of a writing workshop at York Correctional Institution and lives in Connecticut with his family. From the jacket of COULDN'T KEEP IT TO MYSELF, Wally Lamb and the women of York Correctional Institution: Testimonies of our imprisoned sisters In a stunning new work of insight and hope, New York Times bestselling author Wally Lamb once again reveals his unmatched talent for finding the humanity in the lost and lonely and celebrates the transforming power of the written word. For the past several years, Lamb has taught writing to a group of women prisoners at York Correctional Institution. At first mistrustful of Lamb, one another and the writing process, over time these students let down their guard, picked up their pens, and discovered their voices. In this unforgettable collection, the women of York describe in their own words how they were imprisoned by abuse, rejection, and their own self-destructive impulses long before they entered the criminal justice system. Yet these are stories of hope, humor, and triumph in the face of despair. Having used writing as a tool to unlock their creativity and begin the process of healing, these amazing writers have left victimhood behind. |
Aunt_Bob | Sunday, March 02, 2003 - 01:33 pm     ***I wanted so much to share just parts of the beginning section of this book with you all. It sheds insight into the author and how this book came to be. He penned this section titled: Couldn't Keep It To Ourselves, though the remaing sections are personal stories/testimonies of the women prisoner's lives penned by themselves. Excerps from: COULDN'T KEEP IT TO MYSELF, Wally Lamb and the women of York Correctional Institution: Testimonies of our imprisoned sisters First part, WL The toy department at the Durable store sold two blackboards. The modest two-by-three-foot model came with wall brackets and a three-piece starter box of chalk. Its deluxe cousin was framed in wood, had legs and feet, and came "loaded": a pair of erasers, a pointer, a twelve-stick chalk set, and a bonus box of colored chalk. I was a third-grader when I spotted that blackboard. Good-bye to Lincoln Logs and Louisville Sluggers. From the age of eight, I wanted to teach. My first students were my older sisters. As preteenagers, ... (they) were more interested in imitating the dance steps of the American Bandstand "regulars" than in playing school, but a direct order from our mother sent them trudging upstairs to my classroom.... Fourteen years later I was a high school English teacher with my first actual students. Paula Plunkett and Seth Jinks were the two I remember most vividly from my rookie year. Paula had pretty eyes and graceful penmanship, but she was encased in a fortress of fat. Sad and isolated, she sat at a special table in back because she didn't fit the desks. She never spoke; no one ever spoke to her. In my first-year-teacher naivete, I sought to draw Paula into the dynamic, thinking group work and class discussion would save her. My plan failed miserably. Seth Jinks was in the twelfth-grade class I'd been assigned because I had no seniority. "The sweathogs," these kids dubbed themselves. I was twenty-one, and so were three or four of my sweathogs. We honey-mooned for a couple of weeks. Then one morning I walked up the aisle and tapped Seth Jinks on the shoulder. I needed to wake him up so I could exchange the paperback he hadn't read for the new one he wasn't going to read. "Seth, get your head off the desk," I said. "Here's the new book." No response. I poked him. He looked up at me with little-boy-eyes. "Go f#ck yourself," he said. The room went quiet. The sweathogs, Seth, and I held our collective breath and waited for my response. And in that uneasy silence, and the days, and months, and decades that followed, teaching became for me not just a job but a calling. I have found special meaning in working with hard nuts, tough cookies, and hurtin' buckaroos--those children among us who are the walking wounded. That said, I did not want to go to York Correctional Institution, Connecticut's maximum-security prison for women, on that warm August afternoon in 1999. I was keeping a promise I'd made to ...the prison school librarian. To be cont. |
Bananaclip | Monday, March 03, 2003 - 01:06 pm     Thanks for sharing!!! I bought and enjoyed both of his books. I can't wait to read this one. I had no clue he had anything new available, thanks again! Sounds interesting. |
Sia | Monday, March 03, 2003 - 02:31 pm     Hmm, I found "She's Come Undone" to be just incredibly sad, and I didn't enjoy "I Know This Much is True" at all. Guess I'm hard to please with reading material. I don't like depressing novels. |
Fluffybbw | Tuesday, March 04, 2003 - 06:37 am     I read Wally Lamb's book; "She Came Undone" and was deeply moved by it, it is very depressing but I am an overweight person, (hence the name fluffybbw) and I found myself identifying with alot of what I read I just could not believe after reading that book that it had been written by a man, not a woman. |
Sia | Tuesday, March 04, 2003 - 02:07 pm     Fluffy, I couldn't identify with the main character of "She's Come Undone" for many reasons. I, too, am overweight, but I couldn't get past her basically stalking her college roommate's boyfriend, intercepting his letters, deceiving him, and even marrying him under false pretenses. She wondered why the marriage was doomed to failure? I didn't wonder why! |
Fluffybbw | Wednesday, March 05, 2003 - 09:01 am     Sia it has been so long since I read that book that I had completely forgotten about that part, you make an excellent point. What I had identified with in the book was her depression concerning her weight to the point of not doing any housework, watching t.v. all the time, not seeing anyone, feeling blah all the time, sometimes I feel like that, but I make myself get out, see friends, go places, I do clean house, that's because I hate the idea of bugs! And remember Sia we are not overweight, we are FLUFFY!! I am so glad to see you back, I really missed you!! |
Sia | Wednesday, March 05, 2003 - 08:26 pm     Thanks, Fluff; I really missed being here! Yeah, remember now how weird the main character was? I do identify with some of her qualities, like not fitting in with the sorority crowd at college, but I was just really put off by her sheer desperation to snag Dante at any cost. I guess I've been there once or twice in my life, too, when much younger, but never again, girlfriend! It just seemed so sadly desperate of her to create a new persona for her correspondence with her prospective roommate before her freshman year began, knowing that she wasn't anything like the perky, cute, popular character she'd created. It couldn't do anything but alienate the new roommate the moment they met. Then for her to actually intercept Dante's letters and pose as his girlfriend was pretty freaky. I can't believe that she married him and kept her past life a total secret from him for so long. ...but, then again, I have a few secrets of my own, too. |
Aunt_Bob | Sunday, March 23, 2003 - 09:07 am     Excerps from: COULDN'T KEEP IT TO MYSELF, Wally Lamb and the women of York Correctional Institution: Testimonies of our imprisoned sisters continued from 03.02.03 post: That said, I did not want to go to York Correctional Institution, Connecticut's maximum-security prison for women, on that warm August afternoon in 1999. I was keeping a promise I'd made to ...the prison school librarian. Marge had called me three months earlier, as I was preparing for a twelve-city book tour in support of my second novel, I Know This Much Is True. Several suicides and suicide attempts had triggered an epidemic of despair at the prison, Marge had explained; the school staff, groping to find help, was canvasing the community. They thought writing might prove useful to the women as a coping tool. Would I come and speak? Because I’m frequently asked to support good causes and have a hard time saying no, I keep an index card taped to my phone—a scripted refusal that allows me to preserve family and writing time. That day, though, I couldn’t find my card. I told Marge I’d visit when I got back from my book tour. I would never have predicted an author’s life for myself, but when I was thirty, while on summer hiatus from teaching, I’d sat down and written a short story on a whim. I liked doing it and wrote another. For my third story, I fused a sarcastic voice to the visual memory of the mute, islolated Paula Plunkett. For years I had worried and wondered about my former student. What had become of her? What had all that weight meant? Who had she been as a child? In the absence of actual knowledge, the life I invented around her remembered image became my first novel, She’s Come Undone. It took me nine years to figure out the story of that bruised fictional soul whom I’d fathered and then grown to love and worry over. I loved and stewed over the flawed identical twins of my second novel, too---one of whom had a generous measure of Seth Jinks’s anger. What I did not see coming was that the world would embrace these characters also. "Hello, Wally? Guess what?" The caller on the other end of the phone line was Oprah Winfrey. She called twice, once for each novel. The result: best-seller lists, limo rides, movie deals, and foreign translations. Oprah’s Book Club had taken my life by the seat of the pants and sent me on the road. Rock stars on tour bust up their hotel rooms. They get drunk or high, trash the furniture with their bandmates, party with groupies. But authors on tour are quieter, more solitary souls. Between appointments we sit by ourselves in our rooms, nibbling like prairie dogs on room service sandwiches, or ironing our clothes for the next reading, or watching Judge Judy. Perhaps the most surreal moment during my book tour that summer occurred in a hotel room in Dayton, Ohio. While channel-surfing, I came upon the quiz show Jeopardy! At the exact moment my name surfaced. “He wrote the novel She’s Come Undone,” Alex Trebek stated. In the long and torturous pause that followed, the three contestants stood there, lockjawed and mute, itching but unable to press their thumbs to their buzzers. And sitting on the edge of the bed in room 417 of the Westin Hotel, I uttered in a sheepish voice, “Who is Wally Lamb?” I’m a family man, a fiction writer, a teacher, and a guy who can’t say no without the index card. On that nervous first drive to York Correctional Institution, I sought to calm myself with music. To be cont. |
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