Loops and circles …

… Rebecca Solnit: California dreaming | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

"In creative writing programmes in the US you meet all these 23-year-olds writing their memoirs and I always want to throw some kind of hand grenade made out of experimental prose or force-feed them Orwell and Borges until something more interesting comes out," she says. "Memoirs are odd in that they greatly resemble novels in terms of plot and character, and our lives aren't really very much like novels."