Red and Me and Writing Places

I’m pretty sure that Bill Russell didn’t write Red and Me for me. I barely know anything about basketball, and I only ever watch the sport during March Madness. I don’t follow the Celtics (when pressed, my family claims allegiance to the Knicks), so I don’t know anything about Bill Russell’s history with the team or Red Auerbach as its coach. I started to do a little background research when I first received the book, but I stopped myself, curious to see what I could glean from it with no base of knowledge.

As it turned out, I didn’t get very much. I don’t think the book is well-written, and I doubt that familiarity with basketball would have helped. I assume that Bill Russell is a really dynamic person in real life, but on the page, I felt bombarded with his repetitive metaphors. Red was a genius, a psychologist, a mathematician, a leader — repeat! — a genius, a psychologist, a mathematician, a leader, and so on. I kept rolling my eyes at the grandiose language: everything happened “instantly” and “absolutely.” I didn’t buy it.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment for me was that I didn’t think the book fully fleshed out the subtitle,”My Coach, My Lifelong Friend.” It seemed from the start that Bill Russell and Red Auerbach naturally got along with eachother, and I guess that’s all fine and good, but is it compelling? I couldn’t see how they had to work at their relationship, and surely that undersells what their friendship was.

Of all the basketball fans, Celtics fans, and fans of Bill Russell or Red Auerbach, I’m sure someone will like this book. It just wasn’t me.

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If his picture on the back jacket flap of Writing Places is any indication, William Zinsser is an adorable old man. He’s wearing a Panama hat and leaning against a subway stop with his hands in his pockets. It’s exactly how I would picture the man who wrote On Writing Well, which I hear is a classic text of writing courses, not that I ever had to read it (oops).

Writing Places is a petite volume about, well, where Zinsser wrote stuff. He tells about copy rooms and apartment offices and country homes and London flats — wherever his metal writing desk and typewriter settled for a time. It’s a memoir, I suppose, but more accurately, it’s a description of someone at work. Zinsser just happens to be a writer, so he writes about writing, and I drank in the whole thing in one fevered streak. At one point, I put it down because it was high time to go to sleep, but my mind was buzzing so busily with words and writers that I had finish reading.

I loved many lines throughout the book, but these were my favorites:

“Writers, I learned, are one of nature’s most unconfident species, in constant need of assurance that they are not doomed souls.” — on teaching his first nonfiction writing course at Yale

“The hard part of writing isn’t the writing; it’s the thinking.” — on On Writing Well

Zinsser’s tone was so comforting and instructive to me, and his words struck a chord. See, I’ve always downplayed my writing abilities by saying that I was a better editor than writer. But for Zinsser, being a good writer is being a good editor, and for me to shrug off my editing as a sort of second-class skill is assuming I am a doomed soul. Reading Writing Places made me want to get out there and write! Right now! Just thinking about it gives me a thrill.