Living By Fiction (1982)

Previous twenty-two posts in this series on Marilynne Summers Robinson and Annie Doak Dillard, two writers this writer loves rather excessively.

It’s hard to get exact publication dates on books from the early 1980s. Wikipedia (and the books’ respective title pages) indicates that Teaching a Stone to Talk and Living By Fiction both came out in 1982, which makes that year quite an annus mirabilis for Annie Dillard. It lists Stone first, then Fiction. (Dillard’s own web site has it the other way around.)

Two books in one year, only four years after Holy the Firm — that would be impressive in any case, even if we were talking about minor work. But one of the books we’re talking about is Teaching a Stone to Talk. If you’ve read Dillard in an English class, it’s quite likely that you know her for an essay from this book. When essayists talk about Dillard as a life-changing influence, it’s “Total Eclipse, “Expedition to the Pole,” “Living Like Weasels,” or “Teaching a Stone to Talk” itself that they refer to, often enough. It’s tied with Pilgrim at Tinker Creek for Most Canonized Dillard Book and, unlike that book, I also think it has a claim to being her best. It’s her Revolver, her Station to Station. It’s not just bangers in every direction, it’s bangers that permanently changed the genre.

So why am I tackling Living by Fiction first?¹ Mostly because I think it requires a little more advocacy. All but disowned by its author, it’s one of her best books; it’s a little recherché, as the subject requires, but it’s full of gorgeous writing — her own and other people’s. It also makes an argument that beguiles without quite convincing me, an argument I desperately want to be true but that, when I try to believe in it, makes me feel I’m taking it too easy on myself.