Jessica Lourey continues: “. . . whether it’s because we are too close to the trauma, don’t want to hurt or be hurt by those we’re writing about, or simply prefer the vehicle of fiction.” Students in my classes on writing memoir have in fact expressed these same concerns. The … Read More
Category: memoir
“When I was younger, anxiety sometimes flat-out crippled my ability to work.”
In every class I teach, there is at least one student who will talk with me at some point about how high levels of anxiety are preventing him or her from completing assignments. This memoir by Andrea Petersen provides a vivid account of what living with anxiety entails. She writes, … Read More
“We have to keep making choices, keep transforming.”
Some memoirists see themselves as products of their times. Others see themselves in terms of the obstacles they surmounted or movements they created. Samantha Ellis measures herself against the strongest women who live between the covers of novels. Her approach – which the Guardian calls “biblio-autobiography” – is … Read More
“While most children are proof of their parents’ love, I was the proof of their criminality.”
Trevor Noah’s mother was black and his father was white, which was a problem in South Africa in 1984. The Immorality Act of 1927 prohibited “illicit carnal intercourse between Europeans and natives” and said that such acts could result in imprisonment. Until the laws changed when Noah was six, … Read More
“Every work of literature has both a situation and a story.”
The situation, Vivian Gornick explains in this book about the art of personal narrative, is the context or circumstances, while the story is “the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say” (13). Gornick argues that the most difficult and important work of memoirists is to understand why… Read More
“What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean?”
In a Paris Review interview, Jesse Barron observes that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work is “so aesthetically forceful as to be revolutionary.” What makes it revolutionary is Knausgaard’s goal to write “as close to life as possible” even if it means “breaking” the form of the traditional novel. He said, … Read More
“Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them.”
This memoir by Russell Baker encourages readers to write their stories for the generation that hasn’t yet asked for them. He shows us why he believes this: he will always regret not knowing better the person who told him how to see the world and his role in it. After … Read More
“But we did not feel as if anything we said was a lie. We both believed that the real lie was told by our present unworthy circumstances.”
The “truth” looms large in Tobias Wolff’s memoir A Boy’s Life. He tells us, for example, how he hijacked the school application process by creating fake transcripts and letters of recommendations when he applied to schools out East. He describes two types of truth – things he knew were true, … Read More
“I often watched the Southern Cross in the night sky, but it was not just a compass bearing I needed now, it was a judgment about what would be the moral path to choose.”
More than an account of her journey from a sheep-farm in Australia to graduate school at Harvard, this memoir explores the reasons for her decisions with frankness, even-handedness, and intellectual rigor. Jill Ker Conway left her country “. . . because I didn’t fit in, never had, and wasn’t … Read More
“I had had a dream, and that dream was a warning of what might happen to me if I rejected what I’d been and who I was.”
“A blog post, a personal essay, even a full-length memoir, is not about stuffing in as much as you can; rather, it’s about illustrating something correctly.”
Just because it happened, doesn’t make it interesting, Marion Roach Smith bluntly observes in this short book on writing memoir. What makes it interesting? Roach Smith’s answer to this question sets her book apart from other textbooks on this topic. She advocates focusing on a universal theme, such … Read More
“It’s interesting, the secrets you decide to reveal at the end of your life.”
Until Randy Pausch got on stage at Carnegie Mellon University to deliver his now-famous “Last Lecture,” he hadn’t told students or colleagues that Carnegie Mellon had initially rejected his application to go to graduate school there; it was only after his professor at Brown intervened that the decision was reversed. … Read More
“Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”
Simultaneously a “breathtaking memoir” and a “small instant classic of nature writing,” this book juggles multiple themes and techniques. One often-used technique is metaphor: we meet a fellow who is as “serene as a mid-ocean wave” and see the deer “ankle their way out of the … Read More
“Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen.”
When the Paris Review interviewer ask Mary Karr – author of the wild memoir The Liars’ Club — what the biggest problems were with memoirs today, she said, “They’re not reflective enough. They lack self-awareness.” The importance of developing a capacity for reflection is one of the central themes in … Read More
Best of 2015 Books
2015 has been a wonderful year for publishers and readers. My “Best of 2015” list consists of the books that I am most likely to read again. In the memoir category, Norway’s Karl Ove Knausgaard’s fourth volume of My Struggle is part of a series that I believe will be … Read More