Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
Menu
The question of whether to attend a college reunion is often met with mixed emotions—nostalgia, curiosity, a healthy dose of apprehension. What will it feel like to go back to the campus of our youth? How will our lives compare to our classmates’? Which parts of our old selves might get dredged up? If a reunion is about reconnecting with the past, it also invites reflection on how things have changed. It’s a return to a time when we didn’t know yet where our lives would take us. A return to a place that feels familiar though we are inevitably different. It’s a return to people who knew us then but may now be strangers. (I’ve watched the classic college reunion movie The Big Chill more times than I can count but will always be moved by the line: “A long time ago we knew each other for a short period of time.”) In fiction, this combination of comfort and discomfort offers deep narrative pleasures. There’s an inherent drama in gathering a group of people with a shared past in a shared present—whether muddling through their twenties or navigating midlife or approaching older age—and the slow reveal of their collective history. There’s the tension between who we were then, who we are now, and who we imagined we’d become. In my new novel, Reunion , three friends return to their small college in Maine for the twenty-fifth college reunion that was canceled, as mine was, in 2020. Polly, Hope, and Adam all carry with them fragile, untested feelings around re-entering the world one year later. They carry personal baggage too—the stress of a strained marriage, concern over struggling kids, exhaustion after a year of online teaching—as well as complicated feelings around their shared past. Here are eight novels that explore the complexities of reunions—with classmates from college and high school, close friends or near strangers, and former versions of ourselves. * The Group – McCarthy, Mary Mary McCarthy, The Group McCarthy’s iconic novel about eight 1933 Vassar graduates, known as “the group,” opens with the friends convening at the […]
Click here to view original page at The Narrative Pleasures of Social Discomfort: A Reading List of School Reunion Stories
© 2024, wcadmin. All rights reserved, Writers Critique, LLC Unless otherwise noted, all posts remain copyright of their respective authors.
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
The Mallorcan Joana Marcús is a young bestseller in Spain and America, writer of young adult novels with a romantic
