Michaela Kolowski

So it's really about becoming.

And it's very moving as well as being very clinically kind of satirizing.

But it's strange, though, that people expect fiction to be linear.

They want the stories to be linear, except that none of our lives are linear.

None of us live that way.

It's always backwards and forwards and sideways and mutated.

That's right.

That's right.

I think I'm coming back to more non-fiction.

I guess kind of hybrid memoir also came up a lot this year.

It's a beautiful book called Witness by a guy in America called Ariel Berger, who is an educator and a poet and a painter and a rabbi.

And I think most interestingly was the teaching assistant for many years to Elie Wiesel, who was the author and human rights activist and author of Knight and many other books about post-Holocaust life.

But Witness, again, was this really beautiful book

melding of styles and of insights.

In part, it's sort of almost transcriptions of the classes that Elie Wiesel taught at Boston University over a 20-year period.

He had this very interesting teaching style where he would open up the class in the first 10 or 15 minutes and the students had the floor.

They could ask him about anything that was happening in the world.

that didn't even have to connect necessarily to the things they were there to study.

And it seems also it's a really interesting depiction of the diversity culturally and religiously and socially of the students who were there who really got to debate with each other in a way that was very civil that seems to be quite lacking.

But also it's a reflection on, again, on trauma.