Tim Gamble's Blog - Posts Tagged "reader-response"

There is a peculiar danger in writing memoir late in life.

Hindsight makes you smarter than everybody in the story.

Especially yourself.

You know how the marriage turned out.

You know which job mattered.

You know whether the risky decision worked.

You know what happened to the friendship.

You know which financial mistake hurt.

You know which stranger mattered.

You know which argument wasn't worth having.

And because you control the page, you can quietly give the younger version of yourself some of that wisdom.

You can make him more perceptive.

More articulate.

Less foolish.

You can even win arguments you lost fifty years ago.

I didn't want to do that.

Especially with Sandy.

There were witnesses.

During this discussion with ChatGPT, I finally described the mechanism this way:

Always leave the reader in a superior position.

That doesn't mean the reader is superior to the author.

It means the reader is allowed to be superior to Tim-in-the-story.

The author has hindsight.

The narrator inside the event doesn't get to borrow all of it.

That leaves the reader watching.

The reader sees the bad decision developing.

Tim keeps going.

The reader knows Sandy is right.

Tim hasn't figured that out.

The reader sees danger.

Tim sees something interesting.

The reader suspects the plan may be stupid.

Someone eventually asks the obvious question:

“How stupid are you?”

The question could only be answered with:

“I don't know. Let's find out.”

That may be the shortest psychological profile in either book.

Then there are the arrests.

Eventually I summarize my record as nineteen arrests and no convictions.

But the line that matters more is:

“In the end, I guess I never really got arrested so much as I got collected—by cops, by friends, by strangers, even by the occasional girlfriend's dad.”

Collected.

That word destroys the outlaw mythology before it can get started.

Jesse James wasn't collected.

A stray puppy is collected.

So the reader is permitted to judge.

What an idiot.

Why would anybody do that?

How did he not see that coming?

Nineteen?

Really?

Good.

The reader is on top.

That matters because the books also contain statements like:

“I've told my son I only have two rules, forgiveness and humility.”

Then:

“We just don't want to learn the same lesson over and over, so pay attention.”

And:

“We don't build our own self-esteem from the mistakes of others.”

Those are dangerously close to advice.

Put them in the mouth of a narrator who has spent hundreds of pages establishing his wisdom, and the reader has a problem.

Who are you to tell me how to live?

But put them in the mouth of the man you've just watched screw something up, and the relationship changes.

The proposition can be considered without accepting the speaker's superiority.

The reader can think:

He's got a point.

No surrender required.

That became the mechanism we kept finding:

Story.

Judgment.

Laughter.

Identification.

Reflection.

The reader gets to judge Tim first.

Tim supplies the ammunition.

And then, occasionally, something uncomfortable happens.

The reader thinks:

Wait a minute.

I've done that.

Now the reader's superior position has begun to collapse.

But the author doesn't collapse it.

The reader does.

That's the difference.

The book never needs to say:

Haven't we all?

Maybe we haven't.

That's none of my business.

This is also where humor began doing more work than we had originally given it credit for.

The manuscript itself says:

“My words were never weapons; they were buoys.”

The surrounding passage explains that they lifted me above the situation and sometimes pulled other people up too.

Then:

“I didn't get nervous—I got funny.”

At first we treated humor primarily as resilience.

Pressure rises.

The joke releases pressure.

That's true.

But during this exercise I added another function:

Punctuate the handoff with humor.

That changed our reading.

Humor doesn't merely get Tim through the difficult moment.

It also gets the author out of the way.

If I approach a serious idea and remain there too long, explaining why it matters, the reader eventually has to deal with me as an authority.

If I expose the idea, make the joke and move on, the meaning remains behind after the author has left the scene.

The reader can pick it up.

Or not.

The joke hands ownership away.

Sandy is essential to this.

A memoirist has enormous power over his spouse.

He owns the keyboard.

Sandy cannot reach backward through time and correct the dialogue.

I could make myself devastatingly witty in every disagreement.

I could quietly remove the occasions when she saw something before I did.

I could allow her to be loving without allowing her to be right.

Instead, Sandy keeps getting lines.

“It's not the tailor.”

“She's just being French.”

“None more than you.”

And my own admission:

“Once Sandy makes up my mind, she usually sticks with it.”

The writer controls both sides of the page and repeatedly allows the other person to win.

That's more useful than writing:

I am a humble husband.

Besides, Sandy would never let that sentence survive editing.

Early in our relationship:

“I hadn't learned to speak Sandy yet.”

More than fifty years later:

“Or in the silence between two people, still in love, still learning how to listen.”

Still learning.

That's important.

The old man doesn't graduate.

He knows more than the young man.

He isn't finished.

The same thing happens elsewhere.

One of the poems I wrote as a teenager contains:

“The more I learn, the less I know.”

Apparently the teenager understood the problem before the memoirist had 160,000 words to demonstrate it.

And this is where another phrase entered our discussion:

For what it's worth.

Those words aren't printed before every reflection in the books.

They don't need to be.

They are the implied frame.

I can say:

Forgiveness matters.

For what it's worth.

Humility matters.

For what it's worth.

Standards matter.

Money should remain a tool.

People get what they tolerate.

Kindness should be paid forward.

“The world isn't coming to you.”

For what it's worth.

The phrase doesn't weaken conviction.

It relinquishes authority over application.

I know what “the world isn't coming to you” means in my life.

I don't know what it means in yours.

Maybe you're nineteen.

Maybe you're eighty.

Maybe you need to leave.

Maybe you need to stay.

Maybe the world you need to meet is geographical.

Maybe it's another person.

Maybe it's a decision you've avoided.

That's your part.

The author owns the experience.

He doesn't own everything the experience can mean.

Which brings us back to:

“You don't have to own the view to enjoy it.”

I originally wrote that in a discussion about money and possessions.

In context it follows:

“The things you own own you.”

But during our conversation I realized I had been using the same idea elsewhere.

You don't need to own the accomplishment either.

You can contribute to a successful group and allow somebody else to receive the recognition.

Someone with a less secure ego may need the spotlight more than you do.

Accomplishment doesn't require applause.

And perhaps interpretation doesn't require ownership either.

I wrote the story.

You read it.

You may see something I didn't.

I don't need to confiscate your interpretation because my name is on the cover.

I can enjoy the view too.

That family contains money, enoughness, freedom, accomplishment without ownership and humility.

And that brings us to another line:

“I'll take all the blame, and if it goes well, you can take all the credit.”

Absorb blame.

Distribute credit.

Then get out of the photograph.

Preferably with a joke.

And perhaps the author doesn't have to own the reader's interpretation either.

That seems particularly appropriate in a series created through an argument with AI.

ChatGPT proposed interpretations.

I rejected some.

It defended others.

I corrected it.

It corrected itself.

Then Claude came in and challenged the way we were presenting the whole exercise.

Nobody gets the whole trophy.

Including the machines.

Especially the machines.

What mattered was the argument.

That is also why I'm putting the AI involvement front and center rather than hiding it behind some vague reference to “editorial assistance.”

AI did not write these stories.

It came afterward and argued about them.

Sometimes it saw something I hadn't consciously articulated.

Sometimes it mistook an inference for intention.

Sometimes I could point to the manuscript and say:

No. That's not what happened.

And sometimes the manuscript said:

Actually, Tim, take another look.

That's a useful relationship.

Nobody gets to own the view.

The books began with family.

Sandy.

Jeremy.

The people least susceptible to a heroic version of me.

They know the raw footage.

So perhaps the safest thing I could leave them wasn't:

This is the man I want you to remember.

It was:

Here is the evidence.

Here's what happened.

Here's what I did.

Here's where I succeeded.

Here's where I failed.

Here's where I got lucky.

Here's where somebody carried me.

Here's what I thought then.

Here's what I think now.

Here's what Sandy thought.

You choose.

One line says exactly that:

“How many times do you have to learn the same lesson? You choose.”

You choose.

Not me.

So the desired ending isn't:

Tim Gamble understands life.

I'd much rather leave somebody wondering:

Do I understand mine?

If that happens, I don't need the credit.

I don't have to own the view to enjoy it.

For what it's worth.

One saw scattershot stories. The other found the pattern underneath them.

There is something useful about receiving two professional reviews that don't agree.

Not because one liked the book and the other didn't. That's the least interesting difference. Readers are entitled to like what they like.

What interests me is what happens when two reviewers encounter essentially the same characteristics in a book and make very different judgments about what those characteristics accomplish.

That happened with my second memoir, Now What Are We Talking About Here?

Kirkus Reviews examined it and concluded:

“A wide range of stories of one man’s life that’s ultimately let down by a scattershot presentation.”

Danielle Palli, reviewing the same book for Reedsy Discovery, gave it four stars, and Reedsy subsequently designated it a Featured Book.
Her opening description was:

“a humorous, irreverent, unapologetic, and often provocative memoir that harkens back to a time before cell phones and social media”
She compared its nostalgic style to The Wonder Years meeting A Prairie Home Companion.

Two professional reviewers.

Same book.

Same stories.

And, in several places, remarkably similar observations.

But they weren't reading the same book.

At least not after they finished with it.

That seemed worth looking at.

What kind of book were they reading?

Kirkus begins accurately enough. It describes a memoir consisting of anecdotes from my life, framed around questions I pose to myself.
That's exactly what it is.

The first book, Funny You Should Ask, grew from questions other people asked me. In the second, I chose the questions myself.

The stories don't proceed in strict chronological order.

Kirkus regarded that as a fundamental weakness. Without a stronger chronological or thematic structure, the reviewer couldn't find enough of a coherent narrative. The stories became, in the reviewer's estimation, scattershot.

Danielle saw the same construction.

She explicitly notes the questions, the nonlinear storytelling and the fact that, in my case, “the answer was never simple.”

But instead of concluding that there was no coherent narrative, she found coherence somewhere else.

Not between the dates.

Underneath the stories.

That's the central disagreement between the reviews.

Kirkus looked for coherence between the stories. Danielle found coherence underneath them.

And that distinction gets more interesting the closer you look.

Scattershot or progression?

Kirkus wanted greater organization. It suggested that a more thematic structure would have helped and complained that the stories sometimes blurred into an undifferentiated past.

Danielle noticed the lack of strict chronology too.

Then she wrote:

“Readers will also notice an emotional shift…”

That's an important sentence.

She goes on to describe the movement she saw.

The book travels from stories about ROTC, academic probation, youthful risk and adventure toward marriage, aging, illness, mortality and resilience. She specifically identifies my hospitalization with pneumonia and pleural effusion as an awakening about mortality.

So she found an arc.

It simply wasn't a chronological one.

That distinction fascinated me because it touches the central gamble—no pun intended—behind the construction of both books.

I wasn't particularly interested in:

I was born.
Then this happened.
Then this happened.
Then this happened.
Then I got old.

Life didn't feel that orderly while I was living it. I saw no reason to improve its organizational skills afterward.

The questions allowed something else to happen.

A story could call up another story.

A joke could eventually connect to something serious.

A stranger appearing in one chapter could become part of a pattern only after another stranger appeared much later.

Sandy could move from the young woman I hadn't yet learned to understand to the person around whom much of the emotional architecture of the second book eventually turns.

Mortality could arrive quietly until it wasn't quiet anymore.

Kirkus saw the absence of conventional scaffolding and called it scattershot.

Danielle saw the same absence and nevertheless detected movement.

That's not a disagreement about whether a particular joke worked.

It's a disagreement about where narrative structure resides.

Then there is the humor

The two reviews diverge even more sharply here.

Kirkus acknowledges humor but doesn't regard it as sufficient to unify or elevate much of the material.

Danielle sees humor as one of the book's defining mechanisms.
She writes:

“One of the book’s most charming elements is how Tim Gamble, throughout most of his life, delivers witty banter that helps him out of a jam as often as it gets him into trouble.”

Then she demonstrates it.

She points to the story in which a judge reduces my $500 fine to the $32.27 I had in my pocket—after which I asked him if he could spot me five dollars for gas.

That's useful criticism because she isn't simply saying:

Tim Gamble is funny.

She's watching what the humor does.

By the end of her review she has gone farther:

“humor can make bad situations bearable and bring down the temperature in an angry room”

That caught my attention.

Because long after the book was finished, when I gave both memoirs to ChatGPT and began arguing with it about what was actually happening underneath them, humor became one of our longest discussions.

At first we called it a buoy.

Pressure rises.

The joke provides enough lift to keep everybody from drowning in the moment.

Later I added another function:

Punctuate the handoff with humor.

The joke doesn't necessarily erase the serious thing.

Sometimes it allows the serious thing to remain in the room without the author standing over it explaining what everybody is supposed to feel.

Danielle hadn't been told any of that.

She simply read the book and independently identified humor as something that makes difficult situations bearable and lowers the temperature.

That's evidence worth paying attention to.

How important does a life have to be?

This may be the deepest disagreement between the reviews.

Kirkus objects at one point to the elevation of mundane experiences into events carrying greater significance.

That criticism goes directly to something I've been thinking about ever since.

Because the material is frequently mundane.

Treehouses.
Motorcycles.
Furniture stores.
Being broke.
Bad decisions.
Strangers.
Family arguments.
Hospital rooms.
A pair of pennies in loafers.
A motorcycle sprocket.
A ridiculous conversation with a policeman.
A marriage lasting long enough for two people to develop their own language.

None of those events altered history.

Danielle doesn't require them to.

She spends considerable space on precisely that material: the treehouse, the 305 Scrambler, Honda dealerships and the mystery sprocket, injured toes, cigarettes, camp latrines, Route 66.

Then she finishes by saying that beneath those misadventures she found “some surprising universal truths.”

That's quite a divide.

One reader sees ordinary experiences being asked to carry too much significance.

The other looks at those same ordinary experiences and finds something universal underneath them.

That raises a question larger than either review:

How extraordinary does something have to be before it's worth examining?

Memoir has an odd relationship with importance.

We readily understand why someone who survived war, changed history, achieved fame, endured extraordinary suffering or participated in a great public event might write a memoir.

The subject arrives pre-certified as significant.

But what about everybody else?

What if nothing historically important has to happen before a human life becomes worth examining?

What if the extraordinary thing isn't what happened?

What if somebody simply paid attention?

I don't think Kirkus was required to accept that premise.

But I do think that's where the two reviews separate most clearly.

Kirkus questioned whether some of the material deserved the weight placed upon it.

Danielle found the weight by looking underneath the material.

Interestingly, both reviewers wanted more

This may be the most useful thing the two reviews have in common.

Neither reviewer thought the book needed different experiences.

Both wanted something more from the experiences already there.

Kirkus wanted more external organization.
A clearer thematic structure.
More obvious narrative coherence.

Danielle wanted more interiority.

Her first criticism was that some scenes could benefit from richer sensory description and more of the emotional nature of the people around me.

Her second criticism was more interesting:

“I think readers would like to see more emotional vulnerability around Gamble’s relationship with Sandy.”

Then she explained why:

“Because the stories do not follow a strict timeline, it was more difficult to see how she influenced and changed him.”

I think that's fair.

But I also think it's revealing.

Danielle saw enough of Sandy to want more.

She understood that Sandy mattered beyond being the wife who happened to appear in the stories.

What she wanted was greater access to the mechanism of that influence.

The book doesn't usually provide that through explanation.

Instead, Sandy accumulates.

Early:
“I hadn't learned to speak Sandy yet.”

Later:
“Round one to Sandy.”

Or Sandy needs only three words:
“It's not the tailor.”

Eventually:
“Once Sandy makes up my mind, she usually sticks with it.”

Then:
“I don't know what happens from here, but we'll figure it out together. We always do.”

And finally, late in the book:
“Would you do me a favor and promise me you'll let me die first?”

That question changes everything around it.

Sandy explains that she couldn't bear being the one left behind who had to stand before everyone and speak at my funeral.

My solution was to write something someone else could read.

Which means the woman Danielle wanted to understand more fully turns out to be part of the reason the book exists at all.

Danielle's criticism therefore strikes me differently now.

She didn't fail to see Sandy.

She saw enough of Sandy to realize there was something larger happening underneath.

She wanted the author to bring more of it to the surface.

That's a criticism worth having.

The difference between disagreement and misreading

There is another issue that has bothered me about the Kirkus review, and it needs to be separated from literary taste.

A reviewer is entitled to dislike the structure.

A reviewer is entitled to want more description.

A reviewer can find a joke funny, unfunny or irritating.

A reviewer can decide the ordinary material doesn't accumulate into anything significant.

That's criticism.

But facts are different.

The Kirkus review contains descriptions of episodes that I believe misread what actually happens in the book.

The treehouse episode is one example.

Danielle encounters the same general material and describes the world accurately as one in which unexpected visitors might end up sleeping in a treehouse or a truck.

That matters.

Not because Danielle liked the story more.

Because before a critic can decide what an episode means, the critic has to know what happened in it.

The same issue applies to the Vietnam material.

That chapter isn't simply about whether I went to Vietnam.

It's about ROTC, the draft lottery, an enlistment pitch, the choices I made and the moral discomfort of looking back at the people who carried a responsibility I avoided.

A critic can find that inadequate.

But the chapter first has to be engaged on the terms of what is actually there.

That was the reason I challenged Kirkus.

I hadn't paid for a favorable review.

I had paid for a credible one.

Those are not the same thing.

A harsh reading based on the book is useful.

A flattering reading that misunderstands the book isn't.

And neither is a harsh one.

Danielle's criticism leaves fingerprints

There's another reason I find the Reedsy review useful even where it criticizes me.

Danielle shows her work.

The $32.27.
The five dollars for gas.
The 305 Scrambler.
The mystery sprocket.
The toes.
The cigarettes.
The toothbrush.
The hospital.
Sandy.

I can trace her conclusions back to the reading experience that produced them.

That doesn't make every conclusion correct.

It makes the review discussable.

And that's exactly what a serious review ought to be.

Then came the strange part

After both books were finished, I gave them to ChatGPT.

Not to write them.

Not to rewrite them.

Not to discover the stories.

The books already existed.

I wanted another reader.

Then I argued with it.

We eventually spent months examining the two books together.

We found forgiveness and humility.

Standards.

Attention.

The repeated kindness of strangers.

The tension between self-reliance and interdependence.

Money and enoughness.

Sandy.

Mortality.

Humor.

Gratitude.

Reciprocity.

The difference between what happened to the young man and what the older man eventually understood about it.

And we found something I had written decades after learning it as an eleven-year-old boy making wire sculpture:

“I learned that I should use a lot less wire and only try to capture the essence of the movement and leave the rest to the imagination of the beholder.”

My first wire sculpture had been a baseball player in a batting stance.

Too much wire.

Big ugly mess.

The second was a man walking.

This time:

“I used the bare minimum of wire necessary to accomplish the job.”

That walking man became our metaphor for the books.

I knew the philosophical points I wanted to make.

The craft was selecting true stories capable of carrying those ideas without forcing the reader to accept my interpretation.

Enough wire to show the movement.

Then stop.

Leave something for the beholder.

Which brings me back to the two reviews.

Two reviewers walked into the same memoir

Kirkus saw the pieces and concluded they didn't add up.

Danielle Palli saw many of the same pieces and began adding them up.

That doesn't prove Danielle was right about everything.

It doesn't prove Kirkus was wrong about everything.

And it certainly doesn't mean a positive review is inherently more perceptive than a negative one.

Something more interesting happened.

Danielle had none of the analysis that came later.

She hadn't spent months discussing the books with me.

She hadn't heard my explanation that the philosophy was intentional but exposed lightly.

She didn't know about our eventual phrase “always leave the reader in a superior position.”

She hadn't heard “for what it's worth.”

She hadn't heard “punctuate the handoff with humor.”

She hadn't heard our discussion of grace, attention, reciprocity or humor as transmission across time.

She didn't know the walking man had become our metaphor for the craft.

She simply read the book.

And independently she found:

Unpredictability.
Resilience.
Humor.
Kindness from strangers.
Love.
Mortality.
An emotional shift beneath the stories.

In other words, she found a significant portion of the architecture without being told there was architecture to find.

That may be the most useful review I've received.

Not because it gave the book four stars.

Not because Reedsy made it a Featured Book.

Not because it was favorable.

Because it provided an independent test.

Kirkus looked at the structure and said:
Scattershot.

Danielle looked underneath it and found the pattern.

And for a book whose governing artistic principle turns out to have been learned by an eleven-year-old boy bending wire—

capture the essence of the movement and leave the rest to the imagination of the beholder—

that's fairly powerful evidence that there was, in fact, enough wire.