Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life

by Carol Sklenicka

The first biography of America’s best-known short story writer of the late twentieth century.

The London Times called Raymond Carver "the American Chekhov." The beloved, mischievous, but more modest short-story writer and poet thought of himself as "a lucky man" whose renunciation of alcohol allowed him to live "ten years longer than I or anyone expected."

In that last decade, Carver became the leading figure in a resurgence of the short story. Readers embraced his precise, sad, often funny and poignant tales of ordinary people and their troubles: poverty, drunkenness, embittered marriages, difficulties brought on by neglect rather than intent. Since Carver died in 1988 at age fifty, his legacy has been mythologized by admirers and tainted by controversy over a zealous editor’s shaping of his first two story collections.

Carol Sklenicka penetrates the myths and controversies. Her decade-long search of archives across the United States and her extensive interviews with Carver’s relatives, friends, and colleagues have enabled her to write the definitive story of the iconic literary figure. Laced with the voices of people who knew Carver intimately, her biography offers a fresh appreciation of his work and an unbiased, vivid portrait of the writer.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Writing, History, Memoir, Literature

592 pages, Hardcover

First published September 8, 2009

About the author

Carol Sklenicka grew up in central California in the 1960s. She attended college in San Luis Obispo, California, and graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied with Stanley Elkin, Naomi Lebowitz, and Howard Nemerov. Her stories, essays, and reviews are widely published. She spent more than ten years researching and writing the first full-length biography of Raymond Carver.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A DIFFICULT BEGINNING

Married at 19, father at 20, and again at 21. Became possessed with the mad obsessive desire to become a “writer” which his wife amazingly agreed with – she thought he was going to be a great writer too (and she was right). Because the house was full of kids and Raymond and Maryanne were constantly working at this or that low pay job and moving from one apartment to another house and back again like flies trying to find a way our of a room (a room called poverty) novel writing was out of the question – it had to be short stories, that’s as far as RC’s concentration would stretch; and sometimes to get a moment to write anything he had to go and sit in his car which a friend described as “just beat to shit, an old rattletrap that looked like if we got in it would collapse around us”.

But Raymond was one of those obsessive types. Nothing would stop him writing.

AMERICAN EDUCATION IS STRANGE

I guess the word is probably modular. In the UK you go to a university for three years & an extra year if you do an MA. Job done! In the USA you go to this college and pick up some credits, then that university and switch courses and grab more credits; then some teaching here; then there. And the years tick by and you still haven’t got, you know, an actual degree. So Raymond and Maryanne did ten plus years of that.

Along the way they both became alcoholics and smoked a ton of weed.

UPWARDLY MOBILE

In 1978 (aged 40) Raymond Carver was dead broke. He’d never worked a job for more than 18 months, and he’d never made enough money on his writing to consider himself a full-time writer. …His children were living hand-to-mouth on the money they could make doing service jobs or manual labour.

Ten years later Carver was the full or joint owner of three houses, two newer automobiles and a ten year old boat. Additionally he had savings totalling nearly $215,000.

WHAT WAS HE LIKE?

He was a huge shambling muttering mumbling chain smoking dope smoking drunk who couldn’t stand to be alone but needed to be alone to write and mercilessly used all his chaotic always-falling always-failing family’s most intimate moments in his sour funny stories. He loved to fish.



THE LIFE OF RAYMOND CARVER

He said :

You never start out in life with the intention of becoming a bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat or a thief. Or a liar.

A friend who visited said he’d never seen a house

so pockmarked by human conflict – holes in the plasterboard, the carpet and furniture tattered.

Raymond said :

this horrible, mindless poodle…she attacked our laundry and urinated on the living room rug every chance she got… we’d just laugh instead of cry. No furniture…. We couldn’t pay the light bill, and they shut the power off, and we were beaten.

The author says :

When both Ray and Maryanne were arrested, sixteen-year-old Chris was called to fetch her delinquent parents out of jail.

And

The unemployment checks were miniscule, the liquor bills were astronomical - $1200 a month, Ray once bragged (This was 1975)

THE GORDON LISH PROBLEM

Quite early on he got himself an editor called Gordon Lish who was as loud and assertive as Raymond was mumbly and shy. Lish had “aggressive” ideas about editing. I used to believe naively that the manuscript received from the author would be published pretty much as they wrote it. Okay we know that in some cases, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, another person (Ezra Pound) constructed the thing we now have from a heap of materials produced by the author. But I never came across as weird and radical a version of “editing” as what happened to Carver. His stories were sculpted and moulded and refashioned to the point where Lish would say Raymond Carver that was his creation. This is not a myth! It’s all true. (This was the part I was most interested in. )

As a sound engineer might bring up one instrument and play down another, Lish eliminated details that give characters a defining personal history or make settings specific and intimate… Sometimes he changed the emphasis of a sentence and, substituting a few words, made the stories louder and brassier. In others he enhanced the tones of loss and menace.

But take a look at a remarkable example from a story called “They’re Not Your Husband”. Earl watches his wife as she works in her restaurant. She is scooping ice cream. The original version :

The white skirt tightened against her hips and crawled up her legs, exposing the lower part of her girdle, the backs of her fleshy thighs, and several dark broken veins behind her knees.

Lish edited this into :

The white skirt yanked against her hips and crawled up her legs. What showed was girdle, and it was pink, thighs that were rumpled and gray and a little hairy, and veins that spread in a berserk display.

Well, friends, this is not editing, this is rewriting. Carol Sklenicka says “that’s typical of what Lish did throughout What We Talk About When we Talk About Love”. She remarks :

Carver was shocked. He had urged Lish to take a pencil to the stories. He had not expected him to take a meat cleaver to them.

There was some back and forth between them but the eventual published version was Lish’s, who, by the way, is still with us, aged 90. So the great writer caved before the intimidating rewriting frenemy-editor.

A GREAT EXHAUSTING BIOGRAPHY

Almost you can follow the tortuous rackety life of Carver from day to day in this dense dense book. I thought I would be able to skip some of it once Raymond got successful but no, the dramas kept on coming.

For Carver fans only, a must read.

[Moira · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book made it a great deal more difficult for me to love Raymond Carver.

I had much the same reaction reading the other Big Biography of the season, on Cheever -- Cheever did abuse his family terribly while drinking, even to the extent of writing nasty stories about them while they were still living, just as Carver did. But at least Cheever, in his very late sobriety (seven years before he died of cancer) made it up somewhat to his children and wife, and his family now enjoy the royalties and fame stemming from the stories they were part of. Carver didn't just leave his first family when he sobered up and got himself a shiny new life, he consistently refused to help his alcoholic daughter (while taking some pride in his more successful son, and publishing poems about her being drunk and battered), reneged on a verbal agreement to help support his ex-wife, and left them all insultingly small cash bequests ($5,000 when he had over $200,000 in savings, apparently). It is deeply disquieting to read about scenes in which they were apparently pressured over the phone to sign away possible benefits like movie rights to his works after his death.

Recovering addicts are often advised to cut off contact with people they knew when drinking, and Carver's extended family sounds like a chaotic, mentally ill, chronically addicted mess anyone would want to get clear of, let alone a dedicated artist who wanted fame and glory so fiercely he pulled himself out of the gutter to get it. But that same family nourished and supported him during his own worst times -- especially his first wife, who put her own literary ambitions on hold, didn't get her own B.A. until she was thirty and then gave up getting an advanced degree to teach high school and cocktail waitress -- and he went on writing about them up until his own death. Even if he wanted to segregate his own hard-won disciplined peace and sanity from them, would it have been so hard to give back a little of what he had taken, even if 'just' on a monetary level?

Well, someone is likely to say at this point (even if they are only a rhetorical construct for the sake of a new paragraph), so what? Most human beings are jerks, artists are usually even bigger jerks than most human beings because, naturally, they are focused more on art and making it than family ties, and what were you expecting -- just because someone can make beauty out of the human condition means they're not going to be a jerk? Faulkner (a prize jerk himself, especially to his own family) said 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' was worth any number of little old grannies, and so on. Ars vita and all that. Dickens didn't appreciate his own wife and family, Chekhov visited brothels, let's not even bring up Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

But I remember the first time I read 'Fires' - my best friend from boarding school had lent me her copy, the Vintage trade paperback with the construction worker on the cover, a drink and lunchbox in front of him (as this biography wryly notes, not that much in keeping with the actual contents of the book) - and discovered 'So Much Water So Close to Home,' 'A Small, Good Thing,' and especially the title essay. Carver writes about influences on his writing life, and details the pressures of being young, having a young family and no money, and trying to write so vividly I can remember phrases from it decades later. One neglected aspect of the literary 'minimalist' movement is that some authors (notably Carver and Bobbie Anne Mason) tagged with that label wrote about the working poor, the underclass, people who might not read the New Yorker or some of the literary quarterlies those very stories appeared in. Carver especially is often seen as a voice for the voiceless, the desperate, people having furniture sales on their front yards, working two jobs and still declaring bankruptcy, unable to save, often slipping deep into addiction. To see the other side of 'Fires' -- hear the testimony of the children whom he calls 'baleful' and worse -- is a rude shock. He comes off as, really, just another oppressor, a taker.

Well, again, so what? Aren't we all takers and oppressors on some level? Even if we don't personally abuse our families or alcohol or kick puppies, aren't we all by the very nature of modern life involved in great mechanical perpetuations of injustice and suffering we can barely comprehend? I read a Zen saying once that to pick up a grain of dust is to pick up all the suffering in the world -- that there's no choice whether or not you will cause suffering in the world yourself, you will. The only choice we have is to try to be aware of it and make amends when we can. Any biography of any great author is thus doomed to be disappointing, because it just reveals a human being, not a Buddha.

But one of my favourite biographies ever is Anne Sexton: A Biography by Diane Wood Middlebrook, which I've reread at least half a dozen times, and never finished thinking 'wow, one of my favourite authors is now revealed as an awful person.' Because Sexton was frequently an awful person, and Middlebrook details that. But she does so with what I can only call love and compassion -- an understanding that transcends the dreadful events of Sexton's life (alcohol and spousal abuse, constant infidelities and betrayals, sexual molestation) just as Sexton's own art does. After reading Middlebrook's book, I wanted to go back to Sexton's poetry and stories, informed with new understanding -- she had helped me comprehend not just Sexton but also myself. While teaching a course on poetics in 1972, Sexton wrote an astonishing passage in a lecture on empathy and its use in lyric poetry:

The rapist. What moment of his life would you pick to tell about While he's having a cup of coffee at Howard Johnson's? Perhaps he eats a clam roll. I myself like clam rolls but I have more than a clam roll in common with the rapist. What have I ever wanted to take? When have I ever wanted to scare and terrify? If you will look around you with eyes stripped you will hear voices calling from the crowd. Each has his own love song. Each has a moment of violence. Each has a moment of despair.

Middlebrook's biography of Sexton doesn't diminish her, it enhances us, in the act of reading it -- it helps us hear her love song, feel her moments of violence and despair, and understand our own. Reading this biography of Carver had the opposite effect.


On a more prosaic level, Sklenicka's style is either bland or clunky -- if we're told once that Amy Burk is Carver's sister-in-law, it's thirty or forty times, and one couple is referred to as 'the X-Y household' bewilderingly even after they get married -- and, as is true of most modern biographies of writers (including the Cheever book) there is little to no literary analysis -- instead, there's a tiresome and patchy pointing-out of supposed one-to-one correspondences between stories and events in the writer's life. The writer is at her (rather weak) best tying together passages from Carver's letters and reminiscences from friends into a kind of running narrative, and very bad at trying to give a sense of place or time; some extended passages on The Most Overpublicized Decade Ever* are almost embarrassing to read.


*If I had my way there would be a ban on writing about The Sixties for, oh, the next hundred years or so. JFK, Manson, Vietnam, Altamont, Woodstock -- all those cliched references could be replaced by 'YES YES WE KNOW WE HEARD IT ALREADY.'

[David Haws · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book has been extremely well researched, but is perhaps a little partisan.

Ray was my writing instructor at Berkeley. I took four classes from him over the 1972-73 school year, but because we both commuted to campus, we would sometimes wait together for the rush-hour traffic to die down—splitting a pitcher, nursing a vodka and grapefruit juice (he claimed to need the vitamin C) playing liar’s dice, or talking about life and/or writing. I had not spent my formative years around drinkers (for me, you drank with friends when there was nothing better to do, and the whole point seemed to be getting drunk at roughly the same time as everyone else, and then nodding off together). Because Ray never seemed drunk, I was unaware of his problem with alcohol until I helped him move out of his office in Wheeler Hall, and had to dispose of all the empty vodka bottles behind the books in his bookcase. Here is my Bad Raymond story:

It was after we’d wrapped up our spring classes, but the University was publishing its literary magazine, which was to include one of Ray’s stories and the piece of a fellow student. They were having a launch party in the early evening. Bill Kittredge was coming down from Montana to assume the Stegner chair at Stanford, and Ray wanted to introduce us. When I got to the sparsely attended soiree, they had a stack of the magazines (all white, as I recall) in the middle of a white tablecloth and flanked by two half-gallons of Beefeater’s. Ray walked in with Maryann, whom I’d met the previous term, Bill, of whom I’d heard countless stories, and one of Bill’s students from Montana (dressed like a 1973 version of “hippie girl”).

This was the first time I’d ever seen Ray falling-down drunk—Maryann actually did fall down—and only the hippie girl seemed sober enough to walk without leaning on something/someone. There weren’t many people and the girl need to get to her sister’s in Santa Cruz, so I volunteered to leave my car in a parking garage off Channing and drive them all home in Maryann’s Datsun. Before we left, Ray took one of the full half-gallons—concealed it as ineptly as you might expect—and we managed to make it to Maryann’s car.

I was unfamiliar with the South Bay, but Maryann gave copious, smiling directions from the front passenger seat (many of them wrong) we made several loops through San Jose, and we finally reached Santa Cruz, but only after the hippie girl smashed Bill on the head with an empty vodka bottle from the back seat. We must have been in the car for hours, Ray sitting in the back seat with Bill and the hippie girl, cradling the half-gallon of gin like a foundling child—especially when Bill was being assaulted by his student (the basic assumption was that she must have had a good reason, but we could only speculate as to what it might be). Finally we pulled up to the house on Cupertino Road. It had been dark for a while. Ray got out, clutching the bottle to his breast, and opened the front, screen door. As he was fumbling for his keys, he lost control of the half-gallon, which shattered on the concrete step to the side of his foot. We (observers) assumed a deathly silence. As gin sought its own level and the tinkle of glass ebbed, the only audible sound was a low moan coming from Ray, something one might expect from a man witnessing the loss of his darling child.

I’ve spent all but eight years of my adult, productive (pre-retirement) life teaching or taking classes at universities. I have seven degrees, but Ray was one of only three teachers that took enough interest in me to qualify as a mentor. I love reading his stories because I find his authorial voice so comforting, and so I naturally found parts of this book distressing. From our discussions in the early 70s, I don’t think Ray ever expected to support himself with his writing. We talked about grants, and in many ways he was like Galileo, in search of a sinecure, which might allow him to pursue his interest without having to worry about his family. I note with fondness that he received all the grants he’d talked about, as well as the Strauss Living, which he hadn’t. Ray was a sensitive, good man, which doesn’t always come through in the biography.

Trust is the only currency that means much, and yet trust is an affective response. Behavior accords with experience, which includes cognitive experience (reason) but when trust is gone, it’s gone, and seldom returns. Ray and Maryann’s generation was in between that of we baby boomers, and our parents, who had personal experience with the depredations of the Great Depression, and the trauma of the Second World War. Those from the in-between generation had only childhood memories of the War, and with the exception of a few military Advisors, were too old to be significantly threatened by our war in Vietnam. Most of them trusted their parents, churches, and governments as basic dispensers of truth and so tried to emulate their parents’ lives. We (baby-boomers) felt sufficiently threatened to question the hubris of our parents; trust was gone, and nothing was going to bring it back. A few from that in-between generation had also experienced enough to question their inculcated trust, became counter-culture predecessors, and hence leading voices in the counter-culture. The spirit of petty larceny in Ray’s biography has to be understood within the context of his having lost trust—that in conjunction with the way he seemed to ramble through life in a nearly unconscious state. Ray was a guiding light for many.

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this bio. Well, let me rephrase: I liked Sklenicka's involvement, appreciated her thorough research and detailed rendering of Carver's entire life. The whole book read like a well paced novel, exciting at turns, characters well developed. All in all, a very satisfying read.

But the word "liked" doesn't feel appropriate, as the reader learns in such painstaking detail that Carver was such a bastard when he drank--physically abusive and unfaithful to his wife, emotionally unavailable to his family, unable to hold a job.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad he got sober and repaired some of those relationships; I'm glad that he wrote beautiful, thoughtful stories that changed the scope of the American short story. But at the end of the day, it's a very sad biography, a cautionary tale. Is it worth becoming a brilliant writer at the expense of your own humanity? Should your artistic goals supersede your familial relationships?

I love Carver's writing and teach many of his stories, and I'll continue to admire him as a wordsmith, but it's always a tough reminder when those you emulate on the page fail so gloriously in their personal lives. It's important to remember that two things can be equally true: Carver was a brilliant writer, yes, but he also crossed boundaries, especially in terms of violence against women, that are unforgivable.

[M. Sarki · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/5765822...

I had stayed away up to this point in my life from the works of Raymond Carver and any study made of him. I had even discounted him a little because I had visited the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana and saw for myself the correspondence and marked-up manuscripts of Raymond Carver in his relationship to his editor Gordon Lish. The fact that Lish was also my editor and teacher made it a little bit uncomfortable for me to see this much intimacy between a writer and an editor when I was myself attempting to do great things in my writing with the man as well. I felt, prior to my own study, as though Lish did way too much for Carver to make him the man of letters he became. I did not want that type of relationship with Lish. And I didn’t have that, nor do I have it now. Lish has marked up manuscripts of mine, corrected grammar and spelling, and offered suggestions from time to time, but never has he written anything for me nor cut anything so severely as he cut the Carver manuscript for WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE.

I avoided RAYMOND CARVER: A Writer’s Life when it first came out because I figured the author Carol Sklenicka had a bone to pick with my man Lish. Not true at all. She did a very fine job of reporting here. There is abundant information about the importance of so many people involved with the career and life of Raymond Carver. I especially liked the book because of all the notations and anecdotes about Gordon Lish. I borrowed a copy from my local library and loved it so much I went out and found a few copies to purchase of first printings of the hardcover edition because I believe the book will only grow in importance the more Carver is studied, not to mention Gordon Lish.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this bio of one of my favorite writers was an incredible ride. It transported me back to my own hopes and dreams of being a writer and living the "literary life." I read this alongside his recently published collected stories and essays as well as 1996's collected poems, "All of Us" and connected all the dots from his personal life to his writing. He's a true case in point of "write what you know." Ray was certainly the calm center of a nutty life. He was also a decent, generous man whose writing reduced his experiences down to their essence, and revealed the strangeness concealed behind the banal. As writer Richard Ford said at his funeral, "He wrote everything he knew or could sense of human frailty, and everything he could figure out or offer that frailty consolation." His biographer beautifully captures all of that. One interesting tidbit that I did not know was that Ray intended to get a Library Science degree in 1967 in Iowa, but never pursued it when his father died shortly after his enrollment. He re-enrolled in 1969 but again didn't finish.

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit stodgy (repetitive) but I didn't care, loved reading about one of my heroes. How he’s taught by John Gardner: he looks through manuscripts and notebooks on the writer’s desk, envious. The rules they (Gardner and others) were making and breaking. The early rejections and the excitement of acceptances, the little victories that kept him going.

Marvel at Maryann his wife for her energy, literary acumen and brio. Parties and hard work – so many jobs to keep the inept Carver going. Carver the incorrigible drunk and occasional wife beater (she gave as good as she got), indulging in the freedom of the 70s – infidelities, pot smoking - while looking like a man from the 50s. Feel for his wife and kids, and sister in law Amy the beautiful actress and her many boyfriends (including the lead actor from those Russ Meyer films in the 60s). Made bankrupt twice, cutlery bashing and throwing, throttling, arguing, a needy all consuming relationship. He needed Tess Gallagher to finally pull him out of it all and protect him.

The Gordon Lish ‘minimalist’ stuff explored. How his stories evolved beyond that, already were. However it was 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Love' the heavily-edited-by-Lish book that drew me to him. I remember reading a short review in the Guardian in 1982 (?) when I worked as a library assistant and asked the librarian if they could purchase it. I was wowed by it. Lish did make the book all of a piece, a beautiful gleaming gem, even though I can see that the longer versions later restored in 'Beginners' were often better. Without Lish I don’t think Carver would have had the same market/literary penetration.

Although his behaviour towards his family was reprehensible at the end no one could begrudge Carver his lovely final years (Gravy as the poem would have it), how he retained his childishness and delighted in the praise and approval that came his way, smoking pot now instead of the drinking that nearly caused his demise (alas lung cancer got him in the end). All the shenanigans about his will and the shunning of his kids, using family difficulties in his stories to the distress of his ex wife and kids and mother is explored and you can't help tutting. So inside there was the ruthless writer, of course there was, there has to be.

[Chuck O'Connor · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an impressive piece of reportage. Cklenicka does her homework and the extensive end notes show it. The sub-title offers what the book is, "A Wrtier's LIFE" (emphasis mine), and the examination of who Carver was as a person is exhaustive (and at times exhausting). The failing of the book comes with its choice to keep Carver's artistic process and philosophy a mystery. The man comes off as an alcoholic idiot savant whose sociopathic pattern of manipulation towards dependent reliance on friends, his wife, and editors makes Gordon Lish's apocryphal assertion that Lish "created" Carver plausible. But the actions Carver takes and the success he has as an author and teacher contradicts the inference that he was channeling a muse towards automatic writing. I'd have liked this book more if the author would have given illustration into the passion Carver had for his craft, both as a writer and reader of fiction, with an eye to the author's process. We get many stories of his self-destruction through alcoholism and his slow decline to cancer, where friends and former students assert Carver's attention to detail in writing and his coherent explanations of why literature is great, but we don't get a sense of the process the man had beyond these generalized descriptions. I'd have liked to know through a critical look with comparison and contrast of Carver to his heroes how Carver advanced the work that inspired him with the unique insight that made his stories great. I think the choice to keep the inner life of Carver distant is intentional, and I have a theory that Sklenicka chose this perspective to mirror the observational irony Carver employed in his fiction. We get clues to the man's ideas through chapter epigraphs born from snatches of writing he adored enough to transcribe in his notebooks, but we never get a clear critical commentary on the meta-cognition these snatches made towards Carver's philology. The unfortunate consequence of Sklenicka's choice to mirror her author's commitment to unsentimental observation leads to a dry exposition of the man's art. I wanted more insight into Carver's view of reality and didn't get it, but the biography did motivate me to pick up "Cathedral" and read, so maybe Sklenicka's intention was fulfilled with my willingness to return to Carver as a source.

[Hannah Garden · Rating 4 out of 5]

I kind of feel like Blake Bailey has ruined me for all other biographers. No one comes close to what that guy does.

On the other hand, oh man, this is totally worth reading. The whole Lish debacle, man. I am glad to know more about that. And Tess, she's good, it turns out. It's so easy for me to be an uppity asshole about things I don't know anything about. Now I feel like, if I want to be an uppity ass, at least I'll know what I'm talking about. And anyway after reading all about it I don't feel like being one, so there's that to say in favor of this.

And even though you know it's coming, it is utterly heartbreaking to read the end.

I just kind of really really wish Blake Bailey had written it.

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

First read this a couple of times on its publication in 2009 and at that time it was just another of the many books on Carver that I was reading. Rereading it now I'm struck by how much he embodied the writer's life that became a kind of model: MFA, teaching, journal editing, etc. He'd studied with Gardner in the late 50s. Lish was his editor. Iowa, Stegner, etc. And yet so much chaos in his life. And now so much controversy over the texts. Is he read anymore? Excellent biography.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

All art mirrors life to a certain extent, but to what degree is examining an author’s life and experiences crucial to gaining insight into their work? In the case of Raymond Carver, who drew directly from his life for writing material, having the details of this life/literature correlative thoroughly hashed out—thanks to Carol Sklenicka’s exhaustive research—makes for engaging reading. However, far more insightful is being able to bear witness to the sacrifices Carver and his family (particularly his first wife, Maryann) made in pursuing his writing career. Alcoholism, violence, neglect, poverty—all were a part of Carver negotiating his life as a writer. Carver made many destructive choices out of desperation, choices that not only undermined much of what he'd worked for but, at times, nearly destroyed his life and those closest to him. He privileged his writing over the needs of his family, and, yet, when it was a question of first getting published, Carver willingly compromised his voice and vision. (The detailed, complex saga of his relationship with the editor Gordon Lish is one of the more fascinating aspects of this book.) Living such a life of contradiction ultimately propelled him straight to the bottom of a bottle.

But this is also a story of redemption, at least somewhat. Carver manages to finally quit drinking, and it’s hard not see the immense success that follows—both in terms of fame and the quality of his writing—as a reward for this struggle. In the last decade of his life, Carver often counted his blessings, acknowledging that he'd been incredibly lucky. It’s tempting, then, to view his life’s story as a triumph, and, in many ways, it is. But Sklenicka reminds us that many of those that sacrificed tremendously for Carver were, in significant ways, left behind. In the end, it’s Maryann’s life that mirrors those of Carver’s characters far more closely than his own.

Returning to the initial question: how does all of this affect the reading of Carver’s work? Often, when discussing art, the reasons for/against a work depend far too much on the character of the artist. In Carver’s case, where art and life are particularly intertwined, it is easy to let his personal successes and failures color our views of his writing. I’d argue for a more nuanced reading, appreciating, first and foremost, the quality of his craft. One can do this without condoning Carver’s actions, and his work really is deserving of our continued attention. But it’s also important to admit that art does not exist in a vacuum and that some of the greatest works arise from personal conflict and hard won experience. Realizing this can add meaningful context to the work and offer a much deserved understanding and respect for the labor and sacrifice of everyone who played a role in Carver’s journey as a writer. Sklenicka’s biography offers just such an opportunity to more fully examine Carver’s life and work.

[Jack Knorps · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came upon this book by fortuitous chance, and it was like a long reunion with an old friend that deepens your appreciation for them and makes you want to keep in better touch. In other words, I was very into Raymond Carver when I was about 17-19, and I haven't read much since (apart from FIRES, which I re-read after this). This is a big, beautiful biography, and a proper tribute to a man that changed the face of modern American literature forever.

Remarkably intimate and intricately researched, the book opens up the world of "the business of being a writer," and acknowledges that it was as hard for Carver as it still is for everyone else that follows this particular lodestar. While he got started very young (both with his family and his dedication to the craft), and certain connections elevated his stature, ultimately it was his persistence that allowed for his success, though success did not equal fabulous wealth. Rather, Carver lived in abject poverty, continually struggling to make ends meet for his family, which eventually sours that aspect of his life, as depicted in one of the more infamous moments of "Fires," the essay. By the time Carver finds economic stability, his health has been ravaged, and his best work is arguably behind him. Though this makes the biography sound rather dark and depressing--which it certainly is--it is also triumphant and celebratory.

Sklenicka doubles as a biographer and literary critic here, and her analysis of his writing is just as compelling as the stories she recounts of his actual life. It made me want to read more Carver again, and I can't imagine that is different for anyone else.

Finally, apart from being a paragon of its genre, the book unveils cute bits of trivia, such as the fact that Carver attended the same high school as another legendary figure, Justice William O. Douglas, or that Carver favored R.C. Cola because it bore his initials. There is a ton of drinking and alcoholism in it, and so it may serve cathartic ends for readers sharing such struggles, whether they be literary esteem, poverty, substance abuse, or marital/family discord. I didn't even know this biography existed until I randomly came upon it, and it would make an excellent gift for anyone that has designs on publishing short fiction or has more than a casual familiarity with Carver's work.

http://flyinghouses.blogspot.com/2015...

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raymond Carver said his stories and poems were always about the "he-she of human relationships." The story of his own life as Carol Sklenicka tells it in this rich biography largely fits into that mold. All his romantic relationships were a little volatile at least, especially with the wife he married young, Maryann. Relations with his children were stormy as well. Not until he began living and working with the poet Tess Gallagher, who he married near the end of his life, did he find any true emotional stability. Sklenicka spends a lot of energy describing the fact of his life more well-known, his descent into alcoholism. Coupling this with his constant penury, his story becomes the arrival at and the slow crawl along the bottom, the personal desperation this caused, and its effect on his writing. His recovery from alcoholism, along with publishing success and the relationship with Gallagher, saved him. His rise is as interesting as his dissolution. Late in life he delighted in telling everyone how lucky he was.

One joy of the book is Sklenicka's ability to tell a story well. Every Carver encounter with another writer contemporary to him gives birth to a story she's able to spin in some wonderful way. And Carver, it seems, knew everybody so that virtually a Who's Who of contemporary letters strides through the book's pages. Like the actor Kevin Bacon claims to have worked with everyone in Hollywood, Carver may have been acquainted with every writer in his time. In 1977 he met the man who'd become his closest friend, Richard Ford. Another writer, Gordon Lish, was important as a friend and as an editor of Carver stories. While at Esquire and Knopf he was instrumental in getting him published, and his aggressive editing was responsible for the shape of the early stories. As Sklenicka makes clear, however, Carver the teacher and writer was more influential than influenced. Today there isn't a post-Carver poet or writer who hasn't been touched by him.

There's much to like here, like a Raymond Carver story. Sklenicka tells it all well. This is another of those epic biographies so detailed as to show the man complete and to explain how he became legend.

[Zach Salling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved Carol Sklenicka's biography of Raymond Carver.

For any fan of Raymond Carver, the anecdotes are a treat. My favorites are Carver, (I believe) John Cheever, and another author at a McGraw Hill after-party, trying to kick open a bathroom door; Haruki Marukami and his wife meeting Ray, astounded by his imposing figure, later making a large bed just for him for when he would come to visit in Japan (he unfortunately never did); Carver and Cheever's incessant liquor-runs.

Aside from the funny anecdotes, alcohol put a damper on Carver's career. Granted he was able to make stories based on drinking, but during the time he was a severe alcoholic, Gordon Lish, his longtime editor, was nearly ghostwriting for him. Yet, it's debatable if that was just Lish's overbearing, controlling style.

When Carver stopped drinking, his writing became more characteristic of his style. This may also be due to the fact that Lish wasn't editing much of his work anymore. He had larger control over his work and words, whereas when he was drunk Carver would let Lish get away with whatever.

A Writer's Life explores Carver's domestic issues between writing and making money; conflicts between writers, editors, and publishers; the relationship between Carver and his distant children; the relationship between Carver and poet, Tess Gallagher, who ultimately inspired some of his best work.

Fantastic biography--recommended to any Carver fan.

[Bookmarks Magazine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not merely a great biography, but often an astute critical assessment of Carver's writing as well (San Francisco Chronicle), Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life breaks new ground by tying the significant events of Carver's life to his stories and then using those connections as a means of studying both the man and his work. Though the Christian Science Monitor took issue with Sklenicka's focus on the unsavory details of the author's private life, critics were generally satisfied with Sklenicka's scrupulous research and analysis, recognizing that these same details informed the better part of Carver's luminous fiction. Without diminishing Sklenicka's astute examination, this incisive and "grimly compelling" (Seattle Times) biography's greatest achievement will be sending readers back to the bookshelf to rediscover Carver for themselves. This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.

[Deborah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Despite the fact that I was unfamiliar with Raymond Carver, I found Ms. Sklenicka's biography to be a fascinating and detailed account of a troubled author. The saga of this well-known author of short stories was disturbing to me due to Carver's alcoholism and eventual decline into the depths of that disease. The only thing which kept me reading once this bottom was near was that I was aware that he eventually stopped drinking.
I lived in Northern California during the time Carver and his family moved from place to place so therefore knew the locale very well. Infact, I kept thinking I would find a reference to someone I knew or had met. Although this never happened, my connection is that I attended high school with the author. It is hard to believe the commitment and dedication that Carol had to have spent ten years researching and writing this impressive biography. I am exceedingly proud to be able to say "I knew her when ..."

[John M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This biography is well-written, comprehensive (to say the least) and a great tribute to the life of Raymond Carver. Carver is one of the authors that I read and re-read again and again over the years, and it won't be long before I read this biography again. I'm glad that Sklenicka wrote this book, and I believe this is a fitting tribute to Carver's life. It's well researched and reveals a lot about a man we really only know through his short stories. Along with Maryann Burk Carver's book about her life and relationship with Raymond Carver, I think that I've discovered so much more about his drive and passion for creating stories and poetry. This is a must-read for any Raymond Carver fan.

[Robert Vaughan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gross and intense look at the inspiring life of short story writer Ray Carver, one of my many mentors. This is such a painful book to read, only because of the choices Ray Carver made while he attempted to be a writer, husband, father. The family scrimped along on a near poverty level and yet his writing sings still to this day.

[TC Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."

[Charlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

To know the poet, the fiction writer, is to connect with his poetry and short stories.

[Mat C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raymond Carver is an important writer for me. His stories were some of the first adult fiction I remember reading as a teenager. Reading Carver’s stories, I realized that you didn’t need an epic situation or character for a story to feel important. You could tell stories about regular working-class people and make their lives and conflicts feel mysterious. That seems obvious now, but it was a breakthrough for me at the time.

In the alternative reality where I became an English Teacher and had to convince a bunch of students why reading was worthwhile, I’ve always thought that I’d read them Carver’s “Cathedral.” I still remember how I felt as a teenager when I finished that story. I felt 10 feet tall. If you haven’t read it, here is a text version and here is a great reading from James Naughton on Youtube. It’s an easy read, about a closed-minded man who experiences wonder when he is compelled to see the world from a new perspective, a blind person’s perspective. I can’t imagine anyone failing to be moved by the closing lines of this story. The last story I’ve read that gave me the same feeling was Alice Munro’s “The Bear Who Came Over the Mountain.”

When you read the biography of someone you admire you need to be prepared to end up liking that person less. Carol Sklenicka’s great biography Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life helped me understand Carver better, but this is a true warts and all biography. Carver suffered from alcoholism and deserves credit for staying sober later in life, but he was also an abusive husband who nearly killed his wife by smashing a vodka bottle over her head, an indifferent father to his young children, a habitual drunk driver, a flawed teacher who would borrow money from his male students for booze and try to sleep with his female students, a man who took pride in dine-and-dashing at restaurants even though he knew waiters could be stuck with the bill, an especially loathsome quality because his first wife would take on second jobs as a waitress just to make their mortgage payments. I could go on. Sklenicka does not paint a pretty picture of his behavior at times.

Being a kind and moral person isn’t a requirement for being a great writer. Plus, empathetic people are capable of cruelty too. Maybe they are better at it because they know what will hurt. Charles Dickens could display empathy for his characters and champion causes for disadvantaged members of society while Charles Dickens the man was so famous for being a cruel husband that his friends wouldn’t even visit their home because he was so viciously verbally abusive to his wife in front of their children, servants, and guests.

Still, while reading this biography, I kept naively wondering how someone could write a story like “Cathedral” while also frequently displaying a lack of empathy for others. One answer is that “Cathedral” was written after Carver became sober. I’ve learned while reading this book that most of my favorite Carver stories, such as “A Small, Good Thing” and “Where I’m Calling From,” were written after he had taken his last drink. These stories are much more expansive and generous than his earlier, darker stories. His earlier stories are often about two characters hurting each other, emotionally or even violently, while his later stories are usually more about characters trying to understand each other better.

Another theory is the old cliché that “Hurt people hurt people.” Raymond Carver might have just been so beat down by life, alcoholism, poverty, bankruptcies, becoming a parent too soon, that his bad behavior should be understood in context. One of his friends described the Carver household as “pockmarked by human conflict—holes in the plasterboard, the carpet and furniture.” It was a shame to read that while Carver rebuilt his relationship with his kids when they were adults he still found ways to criticize and hurt them in his stories and poems.

Near the end of his life Carver wrote a review of two recent Hemingway biographies. He liked one of them for closely charting the life and struggles of Hemingway’s early years. He found the other one “depressing: “The reader is battered with one display after another of mean-spiritedness and spite, of vulgar and shabby behaviors.” At this point Carver had a knowledge that his work might last. Universities and collectors were paying large sums for his drafts and letters. You have to wonder if he might have been thinking of his own future biography. You wonder if he might have regretted his own “shabby behavior.” One of his friends, Tobias Wolff, didn’t think so. He had what I find to be a pretty damning conclusion about whether Carver felt any guilt:

“Ray brought along only those things which were going to be useful to him and guilt was not going to be one of them. He put the transgressions of the past to use in his fiction, but I don’t think that he felt much guilt about things that had gone bad. He was boyish, and one of the features of that boyishness, I think, was that he had a talent for forgiving himself.”

I think Wolff was right on the money here. After finishing this biography I read Carver’s Paris Review interview where he said this: “I can’t change anything now. I can’t afford to regret…Things happen. I really do feel I’ve had two different lives.” Sklenicka does not ask the reader to forgive or condemn Carver. She portrays him with the same honesty and complexity that he gave to the characters in his stories.

[J Dubyuh]

For my reading tastes, it’s hard to find fiction that reads easy, but it’s also hard to find non-fiction that feels truly transcendently great. Biographies like this are low calorie treats for me, and this one is written in a responsible, straightforward style that Carver would respect. Some of it is dedicated too much to the minutiae of publishing “adventures” and some of it is just boring because Carver, though a legendary alcoholic who traversed his own Cinderella story, sometimes does a good impression of being an unremarkable and even uninteresting person.


As to what compelled Carver to write and what compelled him to drink, and perhaps the commonalities between the two, I don’t feel I’ve gained that much deeper an understanding. But maybe a distant biography is not equipped for that task, and the author certainly wishes for the reader to draw their own opinions, for which I am grateful for.

I lost some respect for the man and then gained some too.

[mitch h · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raymond Carver: A Writers Life, by Carol Sklenicka does a beautiful job illuminating Carver’s complicated, heartbreaking and ultimately triumphant literary journey. Sklenicka conducts hundreds of hours of research and interviews with many of Carver’s friends and family members to piece together stories about his life. This book was a truly immersive experience for me. I ploughed through all of it in less than a week and it was one of the best literary biographies I’ve ever read.

Carver was a complicated guy. He grew up in a working class family with an alcoholic father in Washington State, moved around a lot in his youth, married his teenage sweetheart, Maryann, when he was a teenager, and shortly after graduating from high school, moved to California together and soon had two children.

Ray and Maryann had a wild life (to say the least) growing up through their teens with two young kids. Until his first teaching position in Texas in his mid thirties, Carver did not hold on to a job for longer than 2 years. They family moved around the country, back and forth between California and Iowa for years, and they were often followed by Carver’s mother and sister. But the one constant in his was his unflinching literary ambitions. And his wife, Maryann, went to incredible lengths to support these ambitions. As Ray descended into alcoholism, he paid for his stories with his emotional and physical well-bring, his marriage, and his strained relationship with his children. Some of the stories between 1976 - 78, the years when he was publishing his first book, are especially harrowing as Ray’s late-stage alcoholism nearly killed him. (There’s a couple awful examples of abuse during this time as well.) With that said, Carver found a way to channel his incredible eye for the bits and pieces of our lives that incapsulate our humanity—in all it’s fragility and indecision and ambivalence—into some of the most carefully crafted, beautifully written short stories ever.

Carver spent most of his early writing career telling “he, she stories”—meaning stories of young couples, or a group of friends, doing the best that they can to get by and survive. And in many instances, the harder they worked to stay afloat, the quicker they sank. Carver brings his characters to life in his short stories with perfect minimal descriptions. His writing gives readers this deep sense that the characters they are reading about have a history that extends far belong the confines of the story. This is a world that often exists in the silences, gaps between his dialogue. Often times it’s the things left unsaid that are more powerful than what is—like an iceberg, only 10% of it exists above the surface. In an essay called “On Writing,” Carver sums up this literary vision in this quote: “It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window, curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring—with immense, even startling power.”

Another fascinating thing about this book is Carver’s relationship to his editor Gordon Lish. The two of them met while they were both working across the street from each other at scientific textbook companies. When Lish was hired as the new fiction editor for Esquire magazine, Carver carried the hope that his relationship with Lish would help him gain recognition, new readers, and a chance to make a career as a writer. Later in his life, Lish would move on to become an editor with Knopft publishing house, and helped Carver land his first book deal, publishing Will you please be quiet, please?

Carver’s work, especially the Lish edited pieces in What we talk about when we talk about love, an element of menace, power and force. They end abruptly, without fully realized conclusions and can have a haunting effect on the reader. As they are getting the manuscript for WWTAWWTAL ready for publication, Lish and Carver exchange a series of letters that are reprinted in this book describing Carver’s hesitation about the heavy editing that his manuscript received, even went so far is a imply that Lish bullied Carver into accepting his edits.

The material in this particular book was extremely close to him because of his recent battle with alcoholism. In fact it was the first time in his life he was sober since he was a teenager. (Although he would smoke cigarets and pot for the rest of his life). But his hard parting days were over and with a new relationship to a fellow poet Tess Gallagher, who he previously studied with in Iowa, Carver found the strength to stay sober. This book brought him a new critical acclaim and for it he received a nomination for a national book award. Later on, Lish would brag that he did so much editing work to the stories, they were no longer Carver’s—he was doing so much work that they became his, and he would tell others about it too, even showing one other New York editor Carver’s manuscript pages.

Another interesting fact near the end of the work for Haruki Murakami readers, who served as Carver’s translator in Japan (and also a huge literary admirer) actually built an extra large kingsize bed in his Tokyo home so that Carver could come and stay with he and his wife. But he was too sick with lung cancer to make the trip.

If you’re a fan of writing in general, and have any misconceptions about the devotion and drive that it takes to life a writer’s life, I highly urge you to read this book. But read his short stories first of course. 5/5.

[Alessandro Busi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una delle biografie più belle che abbia mai letto. Accanto alo stile di Sklenicka, che rende queste quasi 800 pagine molto scorrevoli al punto da sentirsi uno di quel gruppo di amici che circondava la vita di Raymond Carver, quello che riesce è la decostruzione del mito in favore dell'uomo, rendendo perciò giustizia a chi più di altri scelse di raccontare l'umanità.
Qui tutto si ricostruisce, il "buon Raymond" diventa narrazione, l'alcol è ossessione e scelta, la prima moglie Maryann esce dalla comune narrazione della moglie-prima-della-fama e conquista il ruolo del grande amore di dipendenza, come spesso è quel tipo di amore che nasce a 14 anni e dura una vita intera. Per non parlare del cattivo Lish, degli Stati Uniti stessi.
Sklenicka si poggia su un lavoro di ricerca mastodontico, che non si limita a rendicontare, ma accumula e sistema per inserire in una matrice di senso sfaccettata la vita immensa di un uomo comune.

[Steven Collison · Rating 5 out of 5]

“You have to be immensely daring, very skilled and imaginative and willing to tell everything on yourself. You're told again and again to write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets?"

[Andrew Sydlik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don’t have time for an in-depth review, but I enjoyed this biography of Carver. I would recommend, however, tracking down Stephen King’s review of the book in the New York Times Book Review, November 2009, for an interesting supplement. King remarks upon the fact that Sklenicka is nonjudgmental in her portrayal of Carver, perhaps downplaying his nastiness and selfishness. I both agree and disagree with King. If I remember correctly, he doesn’t necessarily bring to light anything that was not actually stated in the book, and I think that, for the most part, the author of a biography should try to be as factual as possible, not “taking sides” so to speak.

I have heard people say that this book is dry, too. Perhaps at some points it is, but not enough for me to lose interest. Actually, Carver’s life is too interesting for that to happen. Even in his sober years, there’s always some turmoil a-brewin’, either that, or he’s just constantly on the move and hobnobbing (to his own small town boy amazement) with literary superstars like Salman Rushdie.

I do share King’s indignation at Carver, though. This book definitely opened me up to some of the uglier sides of both Carver and Tess Gallagher. Carver as an egocentric drunk for a good part of his life, and when he got sober and wealthy, he was still egocentric. He could be violent and mean: one incident I remember in particular, Carver smashes Mary Ann’s head on the pavement when he thinks she’s flirting with another guy. What makes it even worse is that he was a philanderer himself.

But he could be sweet and giving as well. He did continue to support Mary Ann after their divorce, though not always as he promised. In some ways, he doted over his children, even at other times, he wrote an essay like “Fires,” where he rails at how much having children hurt his writing life (even as he was just starting to gain success). I would like to say that he was first and foremost dedicated to his art, but I think the hard truth is that he was just selfish. Not that he wasn’t a good writer.

The book does touch on his fiction and his attempts at novels and screenplays that never came to fruition. One criticism I agree with is that the critical analysis of his work is sadly lacking. It seems that literary biographies nowadays are more about looking at how works reflect actual experiences in the writer’s life—which is helpful and interesting to a point, but a more aesthetic analysis would be nice. Sklenicka also spends a lot of time looking at his poetry—again, this is interesting (I never even knew he wrote poetry!), but since his fiction is primarily what he is known for, I think this did go a bit overboard.

Not going to go too much into her discussion of Tess Gallagher. The “redheaded Irish witch,” as I believe one of Carver’s friends called her, kind of spoke against herself by refusing to speak to Sklenicka, give her side of the story. Others, who know the details better, have discussed Gallagher’s involvement. I will just say that while Sklenicka tries to show the positive sides of Gallagher—her intelligence, her efficiency handling practical and financial matters (something Carver had no skill for), and her devotion to Carver (which I don’t doubt)—and yet, there is no way for me to see a justification for what she did to Carver’s family, particularly the children. She may have been a stabilizing influence on Carver’s life, but she did benefit from her relationship to him at the expense of others. There was enough money to go around. But Tess couldn’t be happy having some, she had to have it all. Ah well.

[Beth Phillips · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are biographical subjects who beg for a particular voice to represent them. In relation to short story writer and poet Raymond Carver, Carol Sklenicka has provided that voice. I have no doubt that Carver, post mortem, tapped her on the shoulder and said, "You!"
Sklenicka, who lives in northern California, shares Carver's understanding of the moody northwest Pacific region. Though in adulthood Carver spent years away from the area, its fog and rugged terrain pervade his work. Sklenicka’s is a formidable accomplishment: her own authentic voice evokes Carver’s world by echoing his own sensibility. Her analyses of Carver’s writing mechanics are astute without being intrusively academic.
Channeling this tormented artist could not have been a comfortable experience. A fundamentally sweet man whose frustrations could render him demonic at the height of his alcoholism, Carver went at his writing––and often his relationships––with a hammer and chisel. Sklenicka had to do the same with her extensive archival research and scores of interviews. Though Carver's widow, the poet Tess Gallagher, did not directly participate in the project, the author's even-handed treatment of Gallagher is exemplary. Sklenicka manages to present the facts without an overlay of judgment––no mean feat considering the extent to which alcohol addiction saturated Carver’s life and skewed his judgment. Her point of view is empathetic yet devoid of sentiment.
Carver's controversial relationship with editor Gordon Lish is treated factually and objectively, avoiding the sensationalism that followed publication of the book. Anyone intrigued by the editorial process in general or the case with Lish in particular must read Sklenicka's well-researched account.
Be aware that this life story is harrowing, arising from the relentless grind of ordinary circumstances. The reader’s journey is akin to being penniless and heading out cross-country in a broken-down jalopy, one arm in a sling, marking off miles while in the grip of a severe hangover (a typically Carverian approach to travel). But the book itself is no jalopy: though hefty, it carries you steadily along an organic, chronological framework. And though Sklenicka’s analyses of Carver’s individual works are insightful, she wisely allows his masterful oeuvre to speak for itself. Carver unashamedly mined mundane material, much of it intensely personal, and refracted it through his prismatic imagination. The ultimate achievement of a biography of a writer is to impel the reader to enter the subject’s work with a deeper understanding of the source. This biography accomplishes that task.
I did not want this book to end. It haunts me still.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

If the generation just before them was "the greatest", those born in the 1930s were something different entirely. They were caught between the nobility of those who fought in WW II, and those who gained freedom of some sort coming of age when social mores were coming loose. Their parents, suffering a life-long hangover from the Great Depression, were distant and abusive. Their life was clothes made out on a bed -- marry the first person you have sex with, have kids, work somewhere until you stick -- you just needed to put the clothes on and lie in the bed. They moved out in the suburbs retaining some loose quasi-identities of long tattered ethnicities: Irish, Protestant, Italian, Catholic. On the East Coast, they had a sort of default racial consciousness defined by what they weren't. In the booming post-war economy of much of the country, there was oil wherever they dug. They are now the Archie Bunkers glued to their recliners while watching Fox. (If you aren't successful like them, surely it's your fault.)They were and are crass, undereducated, inarticulate. Many woke up somewhere in their middle ages wondering who the person next to them in bed was, and feeling hollow. Therapy was never their thing, though divorces and AA were sometimes tried on for size.

Raymond Carver was the chronicler of at least a large shard of this generation. His world was deracinated, suburban, and proof that not everyone struck oil -- not everyone could stay at something look enough to. Carver's own story is so compelling, because he's so ordinary, so middle American, provincial without being self-reflective enough to ever generate that word about himself. His stories used simple language to talk about complex emotions.

Biography is always tough to write even if your subject died less than 25 years ago. Skelenicka has done a ton of research, even if it's not enough to fill in every area. It's a page turner, readable, and other than the odd confusing sentence very lucid. She's no great literary critic, and when she puts Carver's life in a historical context, it rings forced. Why does, say Nixon's resigning matter to the narrative? Still, these paragraphs are quick if not entirely painless.

Carver was certainly a bit of a monster. And his biography illustrates you can be as much of a monster through neglect and callousness as by front-sided attack.

All in all, it's nice to have a worthy bio of Carver for fans like me, even if it's not flawless.

[Alex Falconer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could this be the definitive account of Raymond Carver's life? This book is so rich with information mined from letters, interviews, tax statements, notebooks, photographs ... from all conceivable sources. And it's all stitched together near-on seamlessly. There are occasions when paragraphs jump a little jarringly from one to the next but it doesn't detract from the reading experience anywhere near enough to make one want to put the book down.

As someone who has been moved by Carver's short stories, it was fascinating to read about what or who inspired them and how the stories affected those close to him. To give one example, Cathedral was inspired by the visit to their home of Jerry Carriveau, an old friend of Carver's second wife, Tess Gallagher. He was blind and Carver was apparently expecting to meet a man wimpy and withdrawn but was confounded when he turned out to be feisty. Some years later, Tess also wrote a story inspired by Carriveau. It was slated for publication in a collection but her publisher suggested it was too close to Carver's already well-known Cathedral for readers not to notice. Gallagher became angry at this and protested that Raymond didn't have a right to that story as Carriveau was Gallagher's friend, not Carver's.

For an aspiring writer, there is a lot to learn from in Sklenicka's biography of Carver. Simply noting the names of Carver's friends opens up a whole milieu of late-20th century American writers for one to read and learn from. And one can learn not only from their work, but also the lives lived by them. In Carver's case, his alcoholism had a profound effect on his relationships, a lot of which he drew inspiration from in his bleaker stories. When one compares Carver's work as an alcoholic with his work in sobriety, one wonders if the price he paid for his inspiration was too high. (One should not interpret from this that Carver became an alcoholic to find inspiration). On the other hand, however, he arguably could not have written his masterful later works without the wisdom and discipline he gained from his recovery.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compelling must-have for Carver fans and fans of short fiction in general. Sklenicka's documentation is immense and I felt spellbound by her book. I came away both admiring Carver's creativity more and admiring especially his first wife Maryann Carver for the raw deal she got after devoting so many years, and sacrificing her own life, to Carver's success. She was a smart, gifted woman and so many of his stories are her stories too. I can imagine the pain involved in being the muse that was left behind. There's a general caveat here for the families of writers, often ill-used for their material yet not properly rewarded.

The other main point for writers and short fiction fans is the long discussion on to what extent editors in general, and Gordon Lish (who was Carver's first big editor) in particular, "own" these stories. The paradox seems to be that if we are fans of Carver's mid-point anthologies such as What We Talk About When We Talk about Love, heavily edited by Lish, were we liking Carver or Lish? Sklenicka thoughtfully compares some of these detailed editings and raises real questions.

Sklenicka's presentation of the facts and minutiae of Carver's early life, alcoholism, rehabilitation and later fame is done with great restraint, admirable especially where Carver's life has become chaotic due to his drinking. and it would have been so easy to begin blaming. You almost wish she could have come down a little harder on his treatment of Maryann and their two children, yet it's obvious she does really sympathize with them. All in all, her book is very balanced and includes the context of the times--Watergate, Patty Hearst, Carter--and the voices of Carver's family, editors and publishers, colleagues and writing buddies who also made it big in the 70s and 80s, such as Tobias Wolff, Richard Ford and Carver's first mentor, John Gardner, plus old guard writers like Cheever. Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life is an invaluable resource.