During my lifetime I’ve been fortunate to live in two countries other than the U.S.: Israel and the Fiji Islands. While I journaled faithfully during my time there, I haven’t written about those experiences except in a few fictional works. About six months ago I purchased Anthony Doerr’s memoir Four Seasons in Rome to see how he wrote about living abroad. The book sat on a pile of books beside my desk until last month when I rediscovered it, and I’ve been enthralled by his adventure and his amazing writing style.
To give background, on the day Doerr’s wife, Shauna, gave birth to their twin boys, Doerr learned he had been awarded the prestigious Rome Prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters. This came with a stipend, housing, and a writing studio in Rome for a year. When the twins were six months old, Doerr and his family moved to Rome. Thus Doerr faces the challenge of working on a novel and co-parenting newborns in a new country, with limited knowledge of the language and living practices.
This book could have been a straightforward telling of the day to day challenges of parenting infants and writing in a foreign country. While those struggles are present throughout the novel, Doerr interweaves the history of Rome, present day events (Pope John Paul II dies while he was there), descriptions of the art that permeates Rome, interactions with the people—local as well as colleagues at the Academy, and observations that awe: “Our first storm: Lightning lashes the dome of churches. Hail clatters on the terrace. In the early morning, the air seems shinier and purer than I’ve seen it. Dawn stretches across the gardens, pulling tiny shadows out of the blades of grass, draining through the needles of the umbrella pines. The old walls look washed, almost new: a thousand speckled tints of bronze, trailing lacework of ivy, glossy tangles of capers” (p. 27).
Doerr also shares his writing practices: “ I x-ray sentences; I claw away a paragraph and reshape it as carefully as I can, and test it again, and peer into the pages to see if things in there are any clearer, any more resolved. Often they are not. But to write a story is to inch backward and forward along a series of planks you are cantilevering out into the darkness, plank by plank, inch by inch, and the best you can hope is that each day you find yourself a bit farther out over the abyss” (p. 98).
And he concludes – “A journal entry is for its writer; it helps its writer refine, perceive, and process the world. But a story—a finished piece of writing—is for the reader; it should help its reader refine, perceive, and process the world—the one particular world of the story, which is an invention, a dream. A writer manufactures a dream. And each draft should present a version of that dream that is more precisely rendered and more consistently sustained than the last” (p. 156).
In his memoir, not only do we enter Doerr’s world as husband and parent, but we gain insight into Doerr’s process of writing and see the results of that process. Whether you are a reader, writer, or both, Doerr’s memoir offers an opportunity to learn about the writing process, be inspired, experience the wonder of Rome, and enter the dream that Doerr so skillfully creates in Four Seasons in Rome.
Karen T Miller 