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Things like the Truth: Out of My Later Years
Winner of the National Book Award and the author of numerous highly praised works of fiction and nonfiction, Ellen Gilchrist is also a daughter, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother who takes delight in her large, wonderful family. Things like the Truth offers a collection of nonfiction essays about Ellen Gilchrist s life, family, home, work, aging, and the fun of fighting to stay healthy in an increasingly undisciplined culture. This collection brings together for the first time essays by Ellen Gilchrist on her later life and family. Essays such as The Joy of Swimming reveal how Gilchrist, as an aging person, thinks about the joys one can discover late in life. Other essays focus on surgery, money, childhood memories, changing perspectives, and the vagaries of the age. Gilchrist pays special attention to her evolving relationships with her adult children and the pleasures and pitfalls of being a grandmother and great-grandmother. The volume also includes essays from her diary about the sense of place in her mountain home near her work at the University of Arkansas and about life after Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, her second residence.
Reviewers have praised Gilchrist s deliciously wise and humorous voice in her stories and that same voice pours forth in these essays. Gilchrist takes delight in the foibles of human behavior and searches for the humor and wisdom in every situation. She also loves to give advice, and happily dispenses guidance to fans, family, and anyone in a grocery store line. This collection of essays presents Gilchrist at her best. Engaging, funny, and fearless, she describes the joys and difficulties of a well-lived life. Her fans will devour these essays and will revel again in the company of an author they know so well. Both personal and profound, with plenty of humor, this collection allows Gilchrist s inimitable spirit to shine throughout.
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Reviewers have praised Gilchrist s deliciously wise and humorous voice in her stories and that same voice pours forth in these essays. Gilchrist takes delight in the foibles of human behavior and searches for the humor and wisdom in every situation. She also loves to give advice, and happily dispenses guidance to fans, family, and anyone in a grocery store line. This collection of essays presents Gilchrist at her best. Engaging, funny, and fearless, she describes the joys and difficulties of a well-lived life. Her fans will devour these essays and will revel again in the company of an author they know so well. Both personal and profound, with plenty of humor, this collection allows Gilchrist s inimitable spirit to shine throughout.
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- GenresNonfiction
144 pages, Hardcover
Published April 13, 2016
12 people are currently reading
103 people want to read
About the author
Ellen Gilchrist
70 books261 followers A writer of poems, short stories, novels, and nonfiction commentaries, Ellen Gilchrist is a diverse writer whom critics have praised repeatedly for her subtle perceptions, unique characters, and sure command of the writer’s voice, as well as her innovative plotlines set in her native Mississippi.
As Sabine Durrant commented in the London Times, her writing “swings between the familiar and the shocking, the everyday and the traumatic.... She writes about ordinary happenings in out of the way places, of meetings between recognizable characters from her other fiction and strangers, above all of domestic routine disrupted by violence.” The world of her fiction is awry; the surprise ending, although characteristic of her works, can still shock the reader. “It is disorienting stuff,” noted Durrant, “but controlled always by Gilchrist’s wry tone and gentle insight.”
She earned her B.A. from Millsaps College in 1967, and later did postgraduate study at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
She has worked as an author and journalist, as a contributing editor for the Vieux Carre Courier from 1976-1979, and as a commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition from 1984-1985. Her NPR commentaries have been published in her book Falling Through Space.
She won a National Book Award for her 1984 collection of short stories, Victory Over Japan.
As Sabine Durrant commented in the London Times, her writing “swings between the familiar and the shocking, the everyday and the traumatic.... She writes about ordinary happenings in out of the way places, of meetings between recognizable characters from her other fiction and strangers, above all of domestic routine disrupted by violence.” The world of her fiction is awry; the surprise ending, although characteristic of her works, can still shock the reader. “It is disorienting stuff,” noted Durrant, “but controlled always by Gilchrist’s wry tone and gentle insight.”
She earned her B.A. from Millsaps College in 1967, and later did postgraduate study at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
She has worked as an author and journalist, as a contributing editor for the Vieux Carre Courier from 1976-1979, and as a commentator on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition from 1984-1985. Her NPR commentaries have been published in her book Falling Through Space.
She won a National Book Award for her 1984 collection of short stories, Victory Over Japan.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 6, 2018
I have read most of Gilchrist's fiction and enjoyed her lively female characters. In this nonfiction book, she comes off as a real asshole. She writes about her great talent and how everyone loves her books, she embarrassingly trashes one of her three ex-husbands, and she states that she has no use for fat people. I did not finish this book.
November 4, 2018
I have known the people in these stories for well over 50 years. I feel like I don't know Ellen Gilchrist any longer. I love her entire family - and I am especially close to her older brother Dooley's family. Her ugly comments about these people are hurtful. Her bank account will never equal that of the part of her family that she so despises; for they are wealthy when it comes to love, kindness and generosity. I was just at her brother Bob's home in Jackson and had dinner with her son Garth and niece Kathleen. I was very disappointed in this book and the hate she harbors in her heart. The stories I could tell.......
August 3, 2020
I waivered back and forth between 3-4 stars on this. One of the reasons I like Gilchrist's work is that it is largely taken from her life. Fictionalized characters and events are real and jump off the page with grace and humor. In this gathering of essays, from her vantage of age, I see nothing of the spark that usually fuels her work. A little more rigid old lady complaints, despite the fact that she revels in fighting old age, and loves the next generation of her own progeny anyway. Does present unvarnished litany of parental shortcomings, which were not even turned into interesting anecdotes.
I missed the grace and humor.
I missed the grace and humor.
May 16, 2017
I love Ellen Gilchrist. I've missed you, old friend.
I love Ellen Gilchrist. These essays prove the power of her words. I've missed her voice, her wise counsel, her no nonsense take I cherish all her books, and it was nice to visit with an old friend.
I love Ellen Gilchrist. These essays prove the power of her words. I've missed her voice, her wise counsel, her no nonsense take I cherish all her books, and it was nice to visit with an old friend.
September 17, 2017
I felt like I reconnected with an old friend while reading this book. Ellen Gilchrist is my favorite author, and too much time has gone by since I've read her work. I love her writing and her thoughts.
February 6, 2017
Any fan of Ellen Gilchrist's books will love this delightful memoir, guaranteed. For me, it was like taking a fun vacation.
October 24, 2017
As always, Ellen Gilchrist is a delight. These essays are wonderful.
October 2, 2018
Excellent collection of essays by one of my favorite authors.
March 12, 2016
Novelist and short story writer, essayist and writing teacher, Ellen Gilchrist is now eighty and presents this personal collection of essays Things Like the Truth: Essays Out of My Later Years in a voice that is both salty and wise. This is a woman of definite, firm opinion on things such as divorce and drinking to excess – she quit drinking at thirty-two – and the essays say it as she believes, like it or not.
It’s a short quick read and includes essays on ageing, on her three divorces and the need to be alone in order to be a writer, a move she made in her forties: “There is no room in the life of an artist for a husband or a wife or a normal family life. The hours an artist has to spend mulling around in solitude leave no room for the ordinary friendliness and courtesy that a happy marriage demands.” Food for thought – and sometimes the truth can be discomforting, perhaps.
There’s room for love, perhaps, though and in a wonderful essay, In Praise of the Young Man Gilchrist writes movingly about having a lover eighteen years her junior when she was forty-four, a love that lasted till her late fifties, a love she will always treasure even though it had to end: “I love you and I will lose you because this is a land of dreams.” And in simple, plain writing she gives a definition of love that is as true as any I’ve ever read: “None of that had much to do with young or old. Love is liking to be with another person. Having a good time in their presence, thinking that you are good and valuable when you are with them.”
Gilchrist also writes movingly of her two homes : one a condo on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where she observed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in writing that eloquently describes how she and her large family of three sons, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and other family coped with that devastation. But she is equally moving in her writing on her second home – the one she came to in her forties in the Ozark mountains near the University of Arkansas where she teaches writing.
She writes of her childhood and the joys of drive-ins in the 1940s, among other pleasures. She talks of getting older, hanging onto health through exercise, allergy shots, about the benefits of therapy, and about the damage of divorce and how hard it can be to remain with another person. “The more intelligent and sensitive the person the more likely they seem to have their relationships end in chaos. Perhaps the intelligence and sensitivity make it more difficult for them to endure relationships that have gone bad.”
Gilchrist is first and foremost a writer, and her reflections on her craft are again simple and true: “Writing ... means thinking and rethinking each sentence, rethinking structure while trying to save the natural tone, trying to save the truth of what you write, to believe in the voice your brain gave you the sentence in.”
There are essays about her brood of family and the joy they bring, and shepherding her granddaughter and friends on a cruise where they were taking part in a dance competition. There’s wit and wisdom and humour all in one in these essays, where “this is non-fiction and sometimes life doesn’t give us a lot of choices in our endings”.
It’s a short quick read and includes essays on ageing, on her three divorces and the need to be alone in order to be a writer, a move she made in her forties: “There is no room in the life of an artist for a husband or a wife or a normal family life. The hours an artist has to spend mulling around in solitude leave no room for the ordinary friendliness and courtesy that a happy marriage demands.” Food for thought – and sometimes the truth can be discomforting, perhaps.
There’s room for love, perhaps, though and in a wonderful essay, In Praise of the Young Man Gilchrist writes movingly about having a lover eighteen years her junior when she was forty-four, a love that lasted till her late fifties, a love she will always treasure even though it had to end: “I love you and I will lose you because this is a land of dreams.” And in simple, plain writing she gives a definition of love that is as true as any I’ve ever read: “None of that had much to do with young or old. Love is liking to be with another person. Having a good time in their presence, thinking that you are good and valuable when you are with them.”
Gilchrist also writes movingly of her two homes : one a condo on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where she observed the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in writing that eloquently describes how she and her large family of three sons, grandchildren and great-grandchildren and other family coped with that devastation. But she is equally moving in her writing on her second home – the one she came to in her forties in the Ozark mountains near the University of Arkansas where she teaches writing.
She writes of her childhood and the joys of drive-ins in the 1940s, among other pleasures. She talks of getting older, hanging onto health through exercise, allergy shots, about the benefits of therapy, and about the damage of divorce and how hard it can be to remain with another person. “The more intelligent and sensitive the person the more likely they seem to have their relationships end in chaos. Perhaps the intelligence and sensitivity make it more difficult for them to endure relationships that have gone bad.”
Gilchrist is first and foremost a writer, and her reflections on her craft are again simple and true: “Writing ... means thinking and rethinking each sentence, rethinking structure while trying to save the natural tone, trying to save the truth of what you write, to believe in the voice your brain gave you the sentence in.”
There are essays about her brood of family and the joy they bring, and shepherding her granddaughter and friends on a cruise where they were taking part in a dance competition. There’s wit and wisdom and humour all in one in these essays, where “this is non-fiction and sometimes life doesn’t give us a lot of choices in our endings”.
June 5, 2016
I was in Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi a couple of weeks ago, and so of course had to buy this book. I have loved all of Ellen Gilchrist's work, and to be reading her new book in her part of the world, seemed a particularly suitable homage. Of course, the fact that the sweet girl who sold it to me was also (I think I'm right) her grand-niece made it all the more poignant.
If I hadn't been in the South that weekend with a friend who grew up in Mississippi and spent the better part of my time there visitin', I would not have understood as much Ellen's compulsion to tell the truth in her essays of all her wayward extended family. I found myself on several occasions thinking (Do they know she wrote this? Do they mind? Is she betraying them?) but the essays were written with fondness and wonder and a self-deprecating attitude that charmed its way through every embarrassing revelation. It's just the complete opposite of growing up an only child in England, with no relatives, and there were times it made me uncomfortable, I must admit.
I expected less gossip and diary extracts, and more observations and wisdoms, but I did, nevertheless, enjoy Ms Gilchrist's homilies and stories. And it was good to know more about the author who has written some of my favorite short stories. This insight into her own personal life has not changed my love of her work - in fact, it's enriched it.
If I hadn't been in the South that weekend with a friend who grew up in Mississippi and spent the better part of my time there visitin', I would not have understood as much Ellen's compulsion to tell the truth in her essays of all her wayward extended family. I found myself on several occasions thinking (Do they know she wrote this? Do they mind? Is she betraying them?) but the essays were written with fondness and wonder and a self-deprecating attitude that charmed its way through every embarrassing revelation. It's just the complete opposite of growing up an only child in England, with no relatives, and there were times it made me uncomfortable, I must admit.
I expected less gossip and diary extracts, and more observations and wisdoms, but I did, nevertheless, enjoy Ms Gilchrist's homilies and stories. And it was good to know more about the author who has written some of my favorite short stories. This insight into her own personal life has not changed my love of her work - in fact, it's enriched it.
May 9, 2016
If you’re in the mood something more personal in the non-fiction area, check out “Things Like the Truth: Out of My Later Years” by Ellen Gilchrist. The award-winning poet, novelist and essayist, born in Vicksburg, now shares her time between teaching at the University of Arkansas and entertaining her large family at an Ocean Springs summer home.
In her latest collection, Gilchrist presents more than 50 essays about life, family, aging and change. Her words, whether about grandchildren or life after Hurricane Katrina, stand out with passion, honesty and humor. If you’ve read any of her earlier works, you’ll want to continue sharing Gilchrist’s stories of her later life.
ARC provided by NetGalley
In her latest collection, Gilchrist presents more than 50 essays about life, family, aging and change. Her words, whether about grandchildren or life after Hurricane Katrina, stand out with passion, honesty and humor. If you’ve read any of her earlier works, you’ll want to continue sharing Gilchrist’s stories of her later life.
ARC provided by NetGalley
July 23, 2017
3.75 Stars
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews