Helen Benedict
Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven novels, six books of nonfiction, and a play.
Her newest nonfiction book is, Map of Hope and Sorrow, while her eighth and related novel, The Good Deed, will be out in 2024.
Benedict's previous novel, Wolf Season, was called "required reading" by Elissa Schappell and received a starred review in Library Journal, which wrote, “In a book that deserves the widest attention, Benedict ‘follows the war home,’ engaging readers with an insightful story right up until the gut-wrenching conclusion.”
Benedict's 2011 novel, Sand Queen, which features some of the same characters as Wolf Season, was named a “Best Contemporary War Novel” by Publishers Weekly.
A recipient of PEN’s Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History, the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, among other awards, Benedict is also the author of the books, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women in Iraq; Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes; and a play, The Lonely Soldier Monologues.
As a nonfiction writer, Benedict's coverage of sexual assault in the U.S. military inspired the Academy Award-nominated documentary The Invisible War and instigated a landmark lawsuit against the Pentagon on behalf of victims of military sexual assault. Benedict's books on violence against women have won awards from Ms. magazine and elsewhere, and Benedict has published widely and spoken at Harvard University, TED Talks, West Point, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and the United Nations, among other campuses and organizations.
Facebook: helen.benedict.5
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
I love both jazz (favorites being Coltrane, John and Alice; and Miles Davis) and classical (Mozart, Chopin, Bach) but cannot listen to any music when I write because the prose itself has a music to it, a rhythm, melody and beat, and if I were to listen, the outside music would seize my words and force them into its own rhythms and melodies. It would also be very distracting. Writing fiction involves being so deeply absorbed that one is unaware of one’s surroundings. Music would keep calling me back and interrupting. Yet I think there is more similarity between writing and music than between any other forms of art. They are both linear yet multi-layered, both have emotional highs and lows, both are quiet at times and loud at others, soft and then thunderous, complex and then simple. Both weave a kind of tapestry of sound and feeling that either tell or evoke story. I love discussing this with composers!
Is there a work of art that you love. Why? Have you ever visited it in person.
I can’t imagine having one favorite piece of art; there are just too many extraordinary works out there, past and contemporary. But I do remember being deeply affected by Michelangelo’s Pieta when I was twenty-one. I was in Rome after having been knocking around Italy and Greece with friends, and standing in front of that magnificent statue moved me almost to tears. The palpable weight of a dead adult son lying across his mother’s lap, the grief and resignation in Mary’s posture, the inward gaze of deep sadness in her face, the tenderness and tragedy – it was as if the white marble wasn’t stone at all, but real people in real grief right in front of me. It’s such a common image in art but I’ve never forgotten this one. It is subtle and understated and thus all the more affecting. That’s the kind of emotional power a writer hopes to convey with words.
What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
Being an author isn’t really an activity, the way being a writer is, it’s just a title given to the writers who have published books. Using “author” as a verb sounds pretentious, as in “she authored a book on bees.” But “she wrote a book on bees” sounds fine. But I’ll take this question as a chance to talk about the difference between writing nonfiction and journalism versus writing fiction, because, to me, the nonfiction is much more workaday while the fiction is more artistic. I’ve said this before, but to me writing nonfiction is like putting together a complicated puzzle, whereas writing fiction is like controlled daydreaming. It uses entirely different skills. At times they overlap – a novel needs to have a shape, and good nonfiction needs beautiful prose – but mostly I find them wildly different actions. Furthermore, for me, the adventure, or discovery, in nonfiction happens more in the research than the writing. In fiction, the discovery happens in the act of writing itself.
If you could create a museum exhibition, what would be the theme?
What a fun question. I would create an exhibit about memory. It would be a walk-through installation, allowing viewers to explore a labyrinth representing how memory works. There would be dead ends; surprise twists; passages that lead to several different versions of the same memory; there would be lies and astonishing revelations. I’d engage a bunch of smart and talented artists to work together on creating this labyrinth, and then leave it to visitors to make of it what they will.
What do you worry about?
The drive of the human race to self-destruct. Our inherent selfishness and shortsightedness. The need of so many to hurt others. The tribalism that leads to racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia and other forms of irrational hatred.
