The Making of a Writer: Journals, 1961-1963

Gail Godwin was twenty-four years old and working as a waitress in the North Carolina mountains when she wrote: I want to be everybody who is great; I want to create everything that has ever been created. It is a declaration that only a wildly ambitious young writer would make in the privacy of her journal. In the heady days of her literary apprenticeship, Godwin kept a daily chronicle of her dreams and desires, her travels, love affairs, struggles, and breakthroughs. Now, at the urging of her friend Joyce Carol Oates, Godwin has distilled these early journals, which run from 1961 to 1963, to their brilliant and charming essence. The Making of a Writer opens during the feverish period following the breakup of Godwin's first marriage and her stint as a reporter for The Miami Herald. Aware that she is entering one of the great turning points of her life as she prepares to move to Europe, Godwin writes of the 100 different hungers that consume her on the eve of departure. A whirlwind trip to New York, the passengers and their stories on board the SS Oklahoma, the shock of her first encounters with Danish customs (and Danish men)-Godwin wonderfully conveys the excitement of a writer embracing a welter of new experience. After a long, dark Scandinavian winter and a gloriously romantic interlude in the Canary Islands, Godwin moves to London and embarks on the passionate engagements that will inspire some of her finest stories. She records the pleasures of soaking in the human drama on long rambles through the London streets-and the torment of lonely Sundays spent wrestling these impressions into prose. She shares her passion for Henry James, Marcel Proust, Lawrence Durrell, Thomas Wolfe-and her terror of facing twenty-six with nothing to show but a rejected novel and a stack of debts. I do not feel like a failure, Godwin insists as she sits down yet again to the empty page. I will keep writing, harder than ever. Like Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, Gail Godwin's journals brim with the urgency and wit of a brilliant literary mind meeting the world head on. An inspired and inspiring volume, The Making of a Writer opens a shining window into the life and craft of a great writer just coming into her own. From the Hardcover edition.

Review :
"As a diarist myself I read Gail Godwin's diary with complicity, pleasure, suspense, annoyance, competitiveness, astonishment and, yes, a touch of jealousy. She holds her own gorgeously. It's writing about writing, from the inside out: what it means-and takes-to be a writer." -Ned Rorem "[Godwin shows] the ways in which a writer's imagination began to shape the material of her life into what later became notable stories and novels; it's remarkable, in fact, that someone who at twenty-four could write with such wit, perception and rueful self-knowledge would have to wait another half-dozen years before receiving any recognition for her gifts. In one despairing moment, Godwin writes, 'This journal has no earthly use or interest to anyone but Number One.' Profoundly untrue." -Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Apart from Bellow, I can think of only four American novelists-Michael Chabon, Gail Godwin, Craig Nova, and Anne Tyler-whose work could be submitted to an international competition with any confidence." -Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World "Gail Godwin is one of the best writers we have today." -The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "She is America's best living novelist." -San Jose Mercury News "One of the most intelligent and appealing of contemporary fiction writers." -Chicago Sun-Times "From the Hardcover edition." " As a diarist myself I read Gail Godwin's diary with complicity, pleasure, suspense, annoyance, competitiveness, astonishment and, yes, a touch of jealousy. She holds her own gorgeously. It's writing about writing, from the inside out: what it means- and takes- to be a writer." - Ned Rorem " [Godwin shows] the ways in which a writer's imagination began to shape the material of her life into what later became notable stories and novels; it's remarkable, in fact, that someone who at twenty-four could write with such wit, perception and rueful self-knowledge would have to wait another half-dozen years before receiving any recognition for her gifts. In one despairing moment, Godwin writes, ' This journal has no earthly use or interest to anyone but Number One.' Profoundly untrue." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) " Apart from Bellow, I can think of only four American novelists- Michael Chabon, Gail Godwin, Craig Nova, and Anne Tyler- whose work could be submitted to an international competition with any confidence." - Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World " Gail Godwin is one of the best writers we have today." - The Atlanta Journal-Constitution " She is America's best living novelist." - San Jose Mercury News " One of the most intelligent and appealing of contemporary fiction writers." - Chicago Sun-Times "From the Hardcover edition."