Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Landslide
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.minnaproctor.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
http://www.writingfdu.org/minna-proctor/ * https://www.npr.org/2017/09/19/548664829/landslide-probes-a-mother-daughter-bond-in-spare-careful-prose
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Daughter of Gregory Proctor and Arlene Zallman.
EDUCATION:Received M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and translator; also teaches nonfiction, Fairleigh Dickinson University. Fellow, MacDowell Colony, NH, and Bogliasco, Italy.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including American Scholar, Aperture, Bookforum, Guilt & Pleasure, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Nation, and New York Times Book Review. Editor in chief, Literary Review; former editor, Colors; managing editor, Bomb.
SIDELIGHTS
Minna Zallman Proctor teaches creative nonfiction at Fairleigh Dickinson University and works as an editor and translator, mainly of works written in Italian. Her translations include titles by Bruno Arpaia, Tullio Kezich, Federigo Tozzi, and Umberto Eco. She has also written a memoir about the role of religion in her life (her mother was a lapsed Jew, while her father became an Episcopalian minister late in his life after being raised as a Catholic) titled Do You Hear What I Hear?: Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father, and she collaborated with soprano Bethany Beardslee on I Sang the Unsingable: My Life in Twentieth-century Music. Beardslee had been a personal friend of Proctor’s parents, especially her mother, the noted composer and Wellesley College professor Arlene Zallman, and had been among the first to perform some of Zallman’s compositions.
In Landslide: True Stories, Proctor examines her own life through the lens of her complicated relationship with her mother, whose death from breast cancer in November, 2006 sparked some of the initial stories. Landslide “did refer to the Fleetwood Mac song initially,” Proctor said in an interview with Judy Bolton-Fasman published in Jewish Boston, “but then became much more than that. When I started thinking about the book, I was listening to ‘Landslide’ on repeat. I thought it was a good working title and even thought of using the lyrics as an epigram.” But the longer I worked on it and the more the book took its own form, the more the title had to do with what I was writing and not the song,” she explained to Emily Gould in Literary Hub. “Then I drafted the last scene in the book, which is set in a rock quarry, and was about climbing over massive boulders looking for a headstone for my mother’s grave—once that scene happened, there was no going back—it had to be called Landslide. After all, it’s a book about an emotional avalanche that ends in a beautiful pile of rocks.” “As I moved toward the end of the book, I realized it was going to end in the graveyard and thought about how everything was sliding out from under me,” the author told Bolton-Fasman. “The metaphors piled up and it became hard to let go of them. But the book moves beyond the song.”
Critics celebrated Proctor’s collection. Landslide features “crisp, coolly ironic prose that evokes something of the flavor of Joan Didion’s writing,” asserted Harvey Freedenberg, writing in Shelf Awareness. “Landslide is poignant, tart and insightful. Its only flaw is that there isn’t more of it, but perhaps Minna Zallman Proctor will rectify that shortcoming someday.” “She has crafted an affecting elegy for a complicated and contradictory mother,” wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “and an insightful ode to the unknowable.” “In all the best essay collections, you feel like you’ve gained a new friend, but when you close the book, you remember they don’t actually know who you are and the conversation has been all in your head and in their head, but separately,” opined Scott Russell Morris in New Pages. “That’s the sort of bittersweet emotion I had as I finished the last page, which just proves that it is the sort of book to read and reread.” The author’s “essays,” observed a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “sometimes allude to one another in ways–sometimes subtle, sometimes patent–and she is very fond of endings and exits that evoke high emotion in a few words.” “Proctor, editor-in-chief of the Literary Review, occasionally marshals literature to illuminate her life,” said Heller McAlpin in NPR Books. “She invokes Waiting for Godot in a story about searching for a blood lab in midtown Manhattan to test for a cancer marker — convinced she’s inherited that, too, from her mother. After finally managing to get her blood drawn, she observes how ‘Classic dramatic storytelling structure would have a reckoning here … an epiphany.’ But, as in Beckett’s play, her story offers no resolution.” “The significance,” declared Booklist reviewer Amanda Winterroth, “lies not in the events but in the telling, or even the choice to tell.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2017, Amanda Winterroth, review of Landslide: True Stories, p. 30.
Kirkus Reviews, July 15, 2017, review of Landslide.
Publishers Weekly, May 29, 2017, review of Landslide, p. 52.
ONLINE
Fairleigh Dickinson University Website, http://www.writingfdu.org/ (April 18, 2018), author profile.
Jewish Boston, https://www.jewishboston.com/ (October 17, 2017), Judy Bolton-Fasman, “Exploring Life’s Challenges, One Essay at a Time.”
Literary Hub, https://lithub.com/ (October 2, 2017), Emily Gould, “All Memoir Titles Should Be Fleetwood Mac Songs.”
Minna Zallman Proctor Website, http://www.minnaproctor.com (April 18, 2018), author profile.
New Pages, https://www.newpages.com/ (September 6, 2017), Scott Russell Morris, review of Landslide.
NPR Books, https://www.npr.org/ (September 19, 2017), Heller McAlpin, review of Landslide.
Shelf Awareness, http://www.shelf-awareness.com/ (September 19, 2017), Harvey Freedenberg, review of Landslide.
Minna Zallman Proctor
Minna Proctor, FDU MFA Literary Translation and Creative Nonfiction Faculty
Minna Proctor, FDU MFA Literary Translation and Creative Nonfiction Faculty
Minna Zallman Proctor is the author of Landslide: True Stories (2017) and Do You Hear What I Hear? (2004). She has been working in publishing since 1995 and was editor of Colors and managing editor of Bomb. Her essays and reviews have appeared in such publications as Aperture, Bookforum, The LA Times Book Review, Guilt & Pleasure, The Nation, American Scholar, and The New York Times Book Review. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire and Bogliasco in Italy. Proctor’s translation of Love in Vain, Selected Stories of Federigo Tozzi won the PEN Poggioli Prize in 1998. Her other translations include Fleur Jaeggy’s These Possible Lives, Bruno Arpaia’s novel, The Angel of History, work by Dino Campana, fiction by Simona Vinci, essays by Umberto Eco, Pierpaolo Pasolini, and a biography of Fellini. Proctor teaches Nonfiction in the Creative Writing Department at Fairleigh Dickinson University.
BOOKS & PUBLICATION
Landslide: True Stories
I Sang the Unsingable: My Life in Twentieth-Century Music with Bethany Beardslee
Do You Hear What I Hear: Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father
These Possible Lives, translation of essays by Fleur Jaeggy
Love in Vain, translation of the short stories of Federigo Tozzi
The Angel of History, translation of a novel by Bruno Arpaia
Belief or Nonbelief, translation of a correspondence between Umberto Eco and Carlo Maria Martini
you can read a number of her book reviews on www.bookforum.com
WEBSITES
theliteraryreview.org
bookforum.com
bombsite.com
colorsmag.com
minnaproctor.com
Minna Zallman Proctor is a writer, critic, and translator from Italian, and the editor in chief of The Literary Review. New books include the memoir Landslide: True Stories, a translation of Fleur Jaeggy's These Possible Lives, and an autobiography collaboration with soprano Bethany Beardslee, I Sang the Unsingable: My Life in Twentieth Century Music.
Landslide: True Stories
Amanda Winterroth
Booklist.
114.1 (Sept. 1, 2017): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
Landslide: True Stories. By Minna Zallman Proctor. Sept. 2017. 160p. Catapult, paper, $16.95
(97819367876161.818.
In her first collection of essays, Proctor (Do You Hear What I Hear?, 2005) refuses to be reduced to any one
theme. She is by turns hilarious, contemplative, open, and self-deprecating. Though the stories Proctor
chooses to tell are fairly ordinary--if moving to Tuscany and becoming a translator count as ordinary--each
essay is instilled with depth, humor, and meaning, in ways that are not always predictable. Proctor's strength
lies in her use of what she calls "totemic stories": stories where the significance lies not in the events but in
the telling, or even the choice to tell. A moment in a doctor's office leads years later to a revelation about
her own writer's block; in an essay about an early romantic relationship, Proctor admits that she hasn't
figured out the story's significance yet. It's the avoidance of tidy explanations and obvious themes that make
Proctor's writing feel so real, and significance, when she chooses to instill it, seem so meaningful. In the
end, perhaps the theme is clear. What is Landslide about? Nothing; everything.--Amanda Winterroth
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Winterroth, Amanda. "Landslide: True Stories." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2017, p. 30. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509161490/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=38fe4abd.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509161490
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521933117732 2/3
Proctor, Minna Zallman: LANDSLIDE
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Proctor, Minna Zallman LANDSLIDE Catapult (Adult Nonfiction) $16.95 9, 19 ISBN: 978-1-936787-61-6
Stories matter, memory is tricky, the past permeates us: these and other insights appear continually in a
collection of interwoven personal essays.There is no indication that these pieces have been published
elsewhere, though an internet search turns up some previous online appearances. Proctor (Creative
Writing/Fairleigh Dickinson Univ.; Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My
Father, 2005, etc.), a translator, author, and editor, tells a number of stories, some of which resemble one
another in certain ways, others that deal with adolescent foolishness, parents, motherhood, religion,
psychotherapy, writing and translating, death and dying. Throughout, the author remains candid about
herself--sometimes brutally, painfully so. She discusses her early difficulties in school; her relationships
with men, including marriage(s); her times living abroad, where she learned Italian--she's now a translator;
her admiration for various writers, including Muriel Spark; her children's sometimes-evocative
conversations; and her visits with an astrologer. Proctor's essays sometimes allude to one another in ways--
sometimes subtle, sometimes patent--and she is very fond of endings and exits that evoke high emotion in a
few words. Her text, as well, is full of pithy, even aphoristic phrases and sentences--e.g., "the perversions of
memory"; "It is tricky to talk about shame." In several pieces, the author employs a technique resembling a
musical motif: in one essay, she revisits Waiting for Godot several times; in another, an astrologer's
observations pop up now and then. Among the most wrenching of her stories, which appears throughout the
collection, is that of her mother's losing battle with cancer. The final essay, "The Waiting Earth," which
takes readers to a cemetery, features a final sentence that will create a tear in even the driest of eyes.
Affecting stories told effectively, with all the complications involved in searching for truth.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Proctor, Minna Zallman: LANDSLIDE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498344965/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=950a2b7b.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A498344965
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521933117732 3/3
Landslide: True Stories
Publishers Weekly.
264.22 (May 29, 2017): p52+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Landslide: True Stories
Minna Zallman Proctor. Catapult, $16.95 trade paper (160p) ISBN 978-1-936787-61-6
In this collection of interrelated personal essays, translator and critic Proctor (Do You Hear What I Hear?)
explores memory, loss, and family through her relationship with her deceased mother and her experiences
raising children after a divorce. She recalls her mother's decade-long battle with cancer and reflects on the
intangible losses that death brings--for example, the forgotten details of stories that died with their teller.
The book's central narrative concerns these stories and their inaccuracies. The author remembers being hurt
that her mother did not attend her high school graduation, but later learned that her mother did attend and
stayed hidden out of fear that Proctor would be embarrassed by her presence. Past and present frequently
collide, as when Proctor compares one of her son's emotional outbursts ("I know that he is really crying
because I divorced his father") to her own adolescent rebellion, or when she realizes that she relates more to
her mother than to her younger self. The daughter of a devout Episcopalian and a lapsed Jew, Proctor also
explores faith and its potential for providing stability in a life unmoored by uncertainty. She has crafted an
affecting elegy for a complicated and contradictory mother and an insightful ode to the unknowable. Agent:
Rebecca Carter, Janklow & Nesbit (U.K.). (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Landslide: True Stories." Publishers Weekly, 29 May 2017, p. 52+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A494500735/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=0f6e1b02.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A494500735
'Landslide' Probes A Mother-Daughter Bond In Spare, Careful Prose
September 19, 20177:00 AM ET
HELLER MCALPIN
Landslide
Landslide
True Stories
by Minna Zallman Proctor
Paperback, 149 pages purchase
Back in 2006, Minna Zallman Proctor was hit by a landslide of woes that left her reeling. Heavily pregnant with her first child, she was going through a divorce from the child's father while her own mother was dying after 15 years of fighting various cancers. What made matters more painful was that some of her troubles were of her own making: She'd had an affair with another man, and had chosen to leave her husband for him. (That's the short, simplified version.) Proctor, a child of divorce who "just desperately wanted an intact family," was left wracked by shame for what she calls her "betrayal of the self, and the most painful disappointment I've ever endured."
In Landslide, a series of interconnected personal essays, she strives to regain her footing. Digging for meaning, she keeps unearthing examples of the similarities between her life and her mother's, "how tightly our ways were aligned." Only as an adult did she learn that her mother had not one but two failed marriages behind her: Before Proctor's father, there was an early marriage which had been annulled — to her lasting regret — after she had an affair.
Proctor probes their parallels and differences in spare, careful prose, while also examining the very act of telling stories. "In therapy or out of it, creating a narrative is a process," she writes. Fragmented, loosely linked essays have become an increasingly popular form of personal narrative, exemplified in the work of Rachel Cusk and Sarah Manguso, among others. The opposite of gushing, the form can be exquisite but also a bit precious.
The non-linear form is particularly well-suited to her explorations of sensitive subjects ... But her heavily redacted narrative, however artful, sometimes feels evasive.
Proctor's essays fold time in on itself in order to explore the ways in which past and present overlap and merge. The non-linear form is particularly well-suited to her explorations of sensitive subjects like broken bonds and self-sabotage, which are more comfortably approached gingerly, from multiple angles. But her heavily redacted narrative, however artful, sometimes feels evasive. While expressive of her self-declared commitment issues in a way that a tightly straitjacketed chronological memoir would not be, readers may wonder about what's been elided.
Proctor's portrait of her mother, Arlene Zallman — a composer and music professor who returned regularly to Tuscany, where she'd spent a Fulbright scholarship after studying at Juilliard — occasions some of the most beautiful writing in the book. "I can repeat my mother's stories to my children but they will never know how she spoke so quietly as she told them," she writes. "The way she smelled, like water and pencil shavings. How proud she was, how vain, how beautiful, how quiet, how difficult."
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Their relationship wasn't easy. "She was aesthetic to a fault and I was tyrannically pragmatic," Proctor writes. "Her love was demanding, sometimes contractual, almost unbearably consuming." Quite young, Proctor sought the help of therapists — and, later, to her therapist's disdain, an astrologist — in her search for enlightenment. "Why are you convinced you have to live your mother's life?" her therapist asks repeatedly.
Her mother isn't her only focus. She returns to the subject of her first book, an exploration of faith as a source of stability and comfort, partly in the context of her Catholic-born father's late-life calling as an Episcopalian minister. She writes of her two children, both endearingly and with an occasional edge that recalls Rachel Cusk. She writes of her happiness in Italian, "a costume I'd hide in for months at a time," and her work as a translator of Italian literature.
Proctor, editor-in-chief of The Literary Review, occasionally marshals literature to illuminate her life. In the chapter titled "Author of Her Destiny," she considers Muriel Spark's autobiographical novel, Loitering With Intent, with its "massive swatches of fiction embroidered over real life," which helps Proctor understand "the impossibility of a true portrait or self-portrait."
She invokes Waiting For Godot in a story about searching for a blood lab in midtown Manhattan to test for a cancer marker — convinced she's inherited that, too, from her mother. After finally managing to get her blood drawn, she observes how "Classic dramatic storytelling structure would have a reckoning here ... an epiphany." But, as in Beckett's play, her story offers no resolution. Her remarks about the ending of Godot offer a wry commentary on the state of Minna Proctor in her darker moments: "The characters are left staggering off the stage, alive to wait another day. It's a sad journey without a grail."
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Landslide
True Stories
Image
Nonfiction
Minna Zallman Proctor
Catapult
September 2017
ISBN-13: 978-1-9367-8761-6
Paperback
160pp
$16.95
Scott Russell Morris
Minna Zallman Proctor’s Landslide is a collection of “true stories” (essays, really) that focus on matters of family, familiar dysfunction, and/or love gone awry. The essays cover a wide swatch of time, with stories from Proctor’s childhood, her young adult years, and her present, and though each essay can be read separately, together they ask a question that comes up several times: Is Proctor fated to repeat her mother’s life? The question is asked literally as well as literarily as her therapist assuages her fears: “Doctor Wilk always argued the point, ‘You are not destined to live your mother’s life. If you’re so scared of it, just decide not to.’” However, Proctor’s astrologist, has different suggestions: “I commend you on how you’ve resolved things about yourself that you can’t change.” Both these quotes are from the title essay, which is the one that most directly tackles the idea of fate, of her mother’s slow death, of Proctor’s own insecurities with her own path—past and future—ending with her mother’s deathbed pronouncement: “Minna will never be satisfied.”
In many ways, Proctor’s lack of satisfaction is the best part of the whole book. Though living life without satisfaction can be, well, unsatisfying, in essays, a general disdain for satisfaction is quite satisfying for the readers. As a writer rethinks, reexamines, and retells their life, stories, and memories, they come to new and surprising conclusions, which the readers benefit from too. Proctor does this exceptionally well, especially in “A Mystic at Heart,” which again focuses on astrological readings, but also on her (tenuous) relationship to Judaism and her father’s regained faith in Christianity. She had previously written a book on this very subject, but found that there was more to say because her own view of faith and faithfulness had changed in the writing of that book, in the course of getting married, and then cheating on her husband, who had converted to Judaism, though she had not asked him to.
Another thing I love about Proctor’s essays is the surprising way that they move from subject to subject. In the “Mystic” essay, the subjects are braided: starting with the astrologer’s reading, then moving back and forth between that and the writing of her book, her own relationship with Judaism, her mother’s faith, etc. Since the motifs are braided, we expect each to come back and to begin to speak to each other, which they do wonderfully. However, in other essays, the thoughts and ideas move without pattern, allowing tangential associations to move us from one subject to the next, looping back on itself only when it must to bring the idea to a resolute conclusion.
Perhaps my favorite example of this is her essay “The Fool,” which starts as an analysis of her second-grade class picture, then moves to various scenes from her second-grade class, then specifically to one boy—also a Jew of Soviet descent—who made her his rival. This then, is followed with Proctor in the present, dropping her own children off at school, discussing the idea of karma, followed by analysis of children’s stories and how her own children learn that all of their stories, though there is a mighty villain, will have happy endings. But that is counterpointed with a story from Italy, where a friendly neighborhood cat is poisoned and dies miserably while other cats (and Proctor) mourn, and then Proctor’s mother gets cancer and slowly and willfully does not die, until she does. Then, it comes back to second grade, and a prank pulled on her by her rival ends up benefiting her instead of him because the teacher carefully constructs some karmic retribution. Even as I type it out, the large leaps of story and the way it comes back to itself in such sudden turns is enough to take your breath away, but Proctor is the master of such quick turns and delightfully distant juxtapositions.
In all the best essay collections, you feel like you’ve gained a new friend, but when you close the book, you remember they don’t actually know who you are and the conversation has been all in your head and in their head, but separately. That’s the sort of bittersweet emotion I had as I finished the last page, which just proves that it is the sort of book to read and reread.
Review Posted on September 06, 2017 Last modified on September 06, 2017
Book Review
Review: Landslide: True Stories
Landslide: True Stories by Minna Zallman Proctor (Catapult, $16.95 paperback, 160p., 9781936787616, September 19, 2017)
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," Joan Didion once famously observed. In Landslide, her humane, revealing essay collection, critic and translator Minna Zallman Proctor (Do You Hear What I Hear?) dusts off that aphorism to give it a different spin. "I think we tell stories to relate, in order to find a point of communion with our fellow person, in order to say: Look, I get you." Her skill at that task infuses the 14 pieces in this collection with both wisdom and grace.
It's hardly necessary to share Proctor's life experience in order to appreciate her gift of observation and her talent for concision in essays that typically span no more than 15 pages. Whether she's describing her ill-fated romance with a Boston boy named Joey ("Driftwood"), or the awkward searches to secure her mother's burial in a Jewish cemetery ("A Mystic at Heart") and acquire a proper gravestone years after her death ("The Waiting Earth"), the universal subjects of family, love and memory gradually emerge.
If there's a thematic unity to the collection, it centers on Proctor's challenging relationship with her mother, a professional musician and composer she describes as "clingy, indulgent, petulant, and maudlin." The last 15 years of Arlene Zallman's life were lived in the shadow of cancer, a fact that gives special tension to the essay "Distress Abandon"; here, Proctor chronicles the mishaps that befell her as she roamed the Upper West Side of Manhattan looking for the lab where she was to be tested for ovarian cancer. "A Mystic at Heart" recounts her mother's final days in hospice care, a time when Proctor was about to give birth to her first child amid a marital breakup. And the collection's title essay describes the interview she recorded a few weeks before her mother's death. Whether it's the fact that they're both creative personalities, or that they share a passion for Italy, Proctor is haunted by the specter that her life will be a replay of her mother's. "You are not destined to live your mother's life," her therapist tells her. "If you're so scared of it, just decide not to."
Proctor relates all these stories in crisp, coolly ironic prose that evokes something of the flavor of Joan Didion's writing. Landslide is poignant, tart and insightful. Its only flaw is that there isn't more of it, but perhaps Minna Zallman Proctor will rectify that shortcoming someday. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Minna Zallman Proctor's essay collection is an intimate portrait of her life and family relationships.
By Judy Bolton-Fasman for JewishBoston
Exploring Life’s Challenges, One Essay at a Time
Minna Zallman Proctor links her life together in her new memoir, “Landslide: True Stories.”
JewishBoston Editorial October 17, 2017 5 0
Minna Zallman Proctor (Photo: Sandra Dawn)
Minna Zallman Proctor (Photo: Sandra Dawn)
In 2006, an emotional landslide slammed into Minna Zallman Proctor’s life: She was about to give birth to her first child while going through a divorce, her mother was losing her 15-year battle with cancer and, as if that wasn’t enough, Proctor had a complex relationship with the man for whom she would eventually leave her husband. These are the bare-bone facts of “Landslide: True Stories,” a work of linked personal essays in which Proctor excavates meaning from her complicated relationship with her mother and her own intricate spiritual life.
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For Proctor, the daughter of a devout Episcopalian father and lapsed Jewish mother, these essays are at once elegiac and hopeful. She plumbs meaning from her relationships with her parents and her yearning for the intact family she, a child of divorce, never had. In one of these memorable essays, she’s determined to give her mother a Jewish burial. In another, she continues to explore her father’s piousness, which was the subject of her first book, “Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, the Priesthood, and My Father.” Proctor recently spoke with JewishBoston about her work, her Judaism and her late mother.
I read that the title of your book referenced “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. How did you make that title your own?
It did refer to the Fleetwood Mac song initially, but then became much more than that. When I started thinking about the book, I was listening to “Landslide” on repeat. I thought it was a good working title and even thought of using the lyrics as an epigram. As I moved toward the end of the book, I realized it was going to end in the graveyard and thought about how everything was sliding out from under me. The metaphors piled up and it became hard to let go of them. But the book moves beyond the song.
You describe yourself as a private person. What was it like to write and publish these highly personal essays?
While I insist that I’m private, I do make a distinction for myself. When I was writing my first book about my father, I spent a lot of time thinking: “Who cares what I think? Who cares what I’ve done? I’m just a regular person. What makes this interesting to anybody?” I thought about the difference between writing about oneself and absorption, as well as the difference between writing about oneself and emotional exhibitionism. I also started thinking about the issue in terms of personal experiences and the way they are used to connect with other people.
What role does Judaism play in your life?
I’m in a very investigative place in my Judaism. I still have trouble figuring out where to go for the Jewish holidays. I think of “Landslide” as a book about religion and my spirituality, but not in the most obvious way. I’m a spiritual person, but I felt a little knocked around by the Jewish community at the time of my mother’s death and my divorce. I haven’t quite gotten up from that and am reluctant to join a formal community; I don’t belong to a synagogue, but there are Jewish groups I’m a part of. My Jewish life is primarily intellectual and essentially secular. I once read an interview with the theologian Karen Armstrong, a former nun, about how she prayed since she left the church a long time ago and doesn’t practice. Her answer was that she prayed by studying, researching and writing. That’s my form of prayer too.
Landslide – cover mech_FIN 7.6.17 2.indd
(Courtesy photo)
Why was it important to you that your mother had a Jewish burial?
It was important to me and important to her. She had led a largely secular life, but made a couple of attempts at trying to understand why a Jewish burial was important to her. It was finally the hospice rabbi who best heard her questions and understood what she was trying to ask about a Jewish burial. My mother didn’t know what the rituals were or what things stood for, nor what would happen or what it might mean. She did not talk about burial until we got close to the end. We hadn’t planned ahead, and that was hard because Jewish funerals have to happen quickly. There was no room for exploring or finding a Jewish community.
My sister loved the idea of a natural burial—to get put directly in the woods and become part of the earth again. That notion was in keeping with my mother’s wishes—this idea of becoming part of the earth again. But a part of her liked formal beauty and so we ended up doing both of those things. The cemetery where she is buried has a section that is wild and beautiful like a forest. It’s a non-sectarian cemetery, but we had a Jewish ceremony and service.
How does your father’s Episcopalian faith affect you?
To learn that I knew so little about my father and what he holds dear was a real awakening. It was one of those moments when I started looking beyond myself and understanding the people around me. I learned a lot about the intimacy of spirituality too and how profoundly people feel. Writing “Do You Hear What I Hear?” was an amazing learning process during which I grew closer to my father as an adult. I learned about him anew and it shifted our relationship in a completely different way. It was a revelation.
Are there particular topics you feel you’d like to further explore?
I remain interested in this idea of conflict resolution and the ways it plays out through different narratives. I’m also interested in the different manners you tell a story and the ways it changes how you feel about it. Part of conflict resolution is shifting language around or shifting the narrative around. That kind of approach with some of the feelings that were crushing me shifted the narrative and lifted them off of me. Storytelling is a way of resolving what seems like impossible conflicts and situations.
Will you continue to write memoir?
I wrote this book about my mother. It is for her and about her. That may not be a theme I continue. I don’t plan on writing about my son and daughter, but they may come up. At the moment my mother and my children are not part of my new projects, a research-heavy biography and a novel.
Minna Proctor will be appearing at Harvard Book Store on Wednesday, Oct. 18, and the Boston Book Festival on Saturday, Oct. 28. Find more information on Proctor’s appearances here.
Judy Bolton-Fasman
Judy Bolton-Fasman is the culture reporter for JewishBoston.com. She has written about arts and culture for over two decades. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Forward, Tablet Magazine, The Jerusalem Report, Cognoscenti and other venues. Email her at judy@jewishboston.com.
All Memoir Titles Should Be Fleetwood Mac Songs
Emily Gould Talks to Minna Zallman Proctor About Her Landslide
October 2, 2017 By Emily Gould
I’ve been a fan of Minna Zallman Proctor’s work, and of Minna herself, for many years—I have always loved the way her brilliant mind grapples with big, epistemological questions and intimate struggles with equal rigor. I have also had the pleasure of being her yoga student! When I learned that Catapult was publishing a collection of her “true stories” I was thrilled. I became even more thrilled when the book arrived and it was called Landslide—she had entered into a rarefied group, of which I am also a member, of people who have written books named after Stevie Nicks lyrics. Recently I sat down with Minna to discuss motherhood, faith, writing and mysteries of existence. That conversation was way too gossipy and inside baseball so later on we did this Q and A via email.
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Emily Gould: What inspired the title of Landslide?
Minna Zallman Proctor: The title, Landslide, is inspired by the sad sad Stevie Nicks song, Landslide. When I first titled the book, I never imagined that it would stay Landslide because it seemed wrong and improbable and ill-advised to name my book after a Fleetwood Mac song.
But the longer I worked on it and the more the book took its own form, the more the title had to do with what I was writing and not the song. Then I drafted the last scene in the book, which is set in a rock quarry, and was about climbing over massive boulders looking for a headstone for my mother’s grave—once that scene happened, there was no going back—it had to be called Landslide. After all, it’s book about an emotional avalanche that ends in a beautiful pile of rocks.
EG: You’ve been working on these true stories on and off for many years. What catalyzed the process of making them into a book, finally?
MZP: I realized they were a book (and not individual essays) when the stories started depending on each other and talking to each other. I started, for example, hearing back from editors at magazines where I was submitting them that they felt like excerpts and not stand-alone pieces. One magazine took a story and then the editors wanted me to add a lot of background info that seemed to me obviously to belong to another essay that I had written. That was confusing at first but became more interesting. I started thinking about the order and ways the stories overlapped and how I was also, perversely, kind of talking about the same things over and again but in different ways. I took that perversion and decided that it was a form, and that I was writing about a certain time in my life and the themes that haunted it in a Rashomon way—the same story told over and over for different effect.
EG: A few themes run through all these stories, and really all your work: the search for faith amid the failings of organized religion, love and betrayal, motherhood and standing at the crossroads of life and death. That’s a lot to pack in to this concise, precise book. What themes do you think you’ll tackle next? What don’t you feel done grappling with?
MZP: I’m still fascinated by betrayal and love. I have two projects that I’m working on now, one fiction and one nonfiction, and one is about betrayal and the other about love. Religion doesn’t really come into either of those stories except by virtue of the fact that I’m a spiritual person and that probably seeps into my themes and broad structures, but I don’t feel like I’m grappling with religion and organized structures as I was. Though, I still find myself every year without a temple for High Holiday services and no reliable plans for Passover. But that’s more logistical than thematic. Maybe.
As for motherhood, that’s definitely not part of either of my two new projects; I don’t have plans to write as substantially about motherhood as I did in Landslide in the near future. But my kids are everywhere and always on my mind. Realistically, I feel like I can’t write a post-it note that doesn’t reference them.
EG: Your ex-husband wrote a narratively straightforward memoir that detailed your dramatic and painful separation. What is it like to see yourself as a character in someone else’s writing, and what is it like to then re-center yourself as the protagonist of the story? This book is far from anything anyone could call “score-settling”—it’s generous and warmhearted, almost superhumanly so—and yet, you did have to go over some of the same narrative territory that he did. What was that like?
MZP: I’m essentially quite private (especially for a memoirist) but try not to be coy in this book about who I am. I think there’s a lot of candor in my presentation of my own emotional and intellectual self—which I think is one of the most important kinds of candor—at least it’s something I prioritize in my writing and reading. There’s a way in which I want to link this idea to writing “nice,” or sympathetic characters. I don’t think I wrote myself to be likable—but I consciously wrote myself to be as complicated as I am.
I have read a lot of women writers talking about the scourge in the publishing industry that “hates unlikeable women characters.” Parenthetically, but not incidentally, I feel like Emily Books, for example, has put a premium in its list on work that shows full, difficult, and/or complicated women characters and writers. But I’ve been turning this debate over and over in my mind and I can’t think of who these favored likable women characters are? Can you? I’m starting to wonder if it’s a false debate. From Lily Bart to Lila and Lena from Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, it seems instead that we have an array of well-rounded characters that are sympathetic (at least familiar), piteous, and grotesque in all their significant aspects. The same way your best friend, or say, your mother, is. Rich, complicated, frustrating, sometimes tragic, and sometimes what gets you through the day. I guess I’m just wondering whether the question of likable should be reframed in terms of how successfully a character is drawn. Or maybe I mean, it’s a technical question, not a feminist question.
EG: I LOVE your use of astrology as a framing device in your essay about religion, faith and superstition. Do you still consult with your astrologer? What’s in the stars for you?
MZP: I still see my astrologer—maybe once every two or three years for a check up. I don’t go to him with specific questions, though I think others do. I talk to him a lot about faith and not about superstition as much as about patterns and rhythms. I am apparently constitutionally unsuited for true love, yet I love truly. And I’m going to, at some point soon (like in the next two decades), finally find a spiritual mentor. I’m really looking forward to that.