Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

By: Brian Evenson

Narrated by: Brian Evenson

Length: 3 hrs and 18 mins

Publisher's summary

A haunting meditation on love, loss, companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the most important and influential short story collections in contemporary literature. In his entry in the esteemed Bookmarked series, acclaimed author Brian Evenson offers his personal and literary take on this classic Carver collection.

©2018 Brian Evenson (P)2022 Audible, Inc.

A Thoughtful Analytic Memoir

Brian Evenson's book, a must-listen for anyone interested in the process of writing and perfecting stories, is a sort of hybrid of memoir and textual exegesis, recounting his first encounters with Raymond Carver's seminal collection alongside his early journey as a young writer growing apart from the Mormon faith and institutions he grew up with. Though Evenson is primarily a renowned author of horror fiction, his craft analysis of Carver's (mostly) literary realist stories are sharp and well-observed. These threads make up roughly the first half of the book.

The second half of the book, which is just as interesting if not moreso, is Evenson's meditations on the "inside baseball" aspects of the relationship between Carver and his longtime editor, Gordon Lish. Said relationship is the stuff of high drama where the world of publishing is concerned: Lish had a reputation as a particularly severe and demanding editor, most infamously with regard to "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" - it is considered by some to be as much of a Lish book as it is a Carver book, if not moreso. Carver later regretted accepting Lish's edits and released another version of the collection without them (entitled "Beginners"), an extremely rare and highly public clash over who owns what when it comes to the art of writing.

Evenson, who had his own run ins with Lish over the years, takes the opportunity to examine the ethical dimensions of the editorial process and Lish's in particular, and whether "What We Talk About..." benefits or suffers from Lish's exacting standards of literary austerity and minimalism.

I thought I knew this story

This deeply personal telling by one critically acclaimed writer of his experience of coming to hard grips with another even more famous writer’s creative life is stunning and unlike anything I’ve read before about something that’s actually been talked about quite a lot. Writers and readers need things like this.