Reading: Nam Le

Nam Le's Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice is about a Vietnamese boy with the same title as the author. The name and origin of the protagonist lead us to draw parallels between both Nam Les (character and author). Nam Le however stated:

A lot of people presume if I'm writing a narrator who has clear parallels to me, that's just sheer inertia; that there's a natural adaptation from so-called life to so-called text. But any careful reader or writer would understand how much artifice and contrivance go into making this self-standing and self-contained

Basically, even though the story has similarities, it isn't about him. It is self-contained, standalone, as if written by anyone.
Nam Le (the character) is in Iowa with his sick dad attending a writing workshop. On page 18, Nam Le sees Linda at a coffee shop while he is going over his paper. He notices she is "unmaking a smile". A phrase not found anywhere else and has an interesting connotation. As she began speaking to him, I belief this unmade smile to be a precursor to a very well made frown.

"You know what I think?...I think you're making excuses for him...You're romanticizing his past to make sense of the things you said he did to you." (Linda speaking to Nam Le about his paper, pg 18)

Unmaking a smile leave uncertainty as to the true emotion left both on the face and beneath.
Several times throughout the story Nam Le mentions tips for writing. "The thing is not to write what no one else could have written but to write what only you could have written" (p 23). I've been told that write only what what I know. This statement could not be more true. While many could write about the same experience, the same story, none of their tellings would be the same. Each affected by location, past experiences, personalities, morals, even what they were doing when the event began. The past so vastly affects our thoughts but we tend to oversee that, believing everyone else so very biased in their stories not realizing we are just as bad.
Shortly after, Nam Le tells his father "If I write a true story...I'll have a better chance of selling it" (pg 24). Most readers want to read for entertainment rather than for gaining knowledge, not to say that isn't an added bonus or that some reading is done specifically for that purpose. Fiction sells easier than nonfiction. Our society is far less fond of long-prose in age. The largest generation buying books today are still in school, many looking for a adventurous escape. Fiction draws on our imaginations, allowing us to go where no one ever could, do what could never be done. There is a great appeal to just sit down in the afternoon after school and imagine yourself away to Hogwarts or the USS Enterprise.

-Mark