This is the first sentence from The White Album by Joan Didion, a classic from 1979. Known for her precise, unsentimental tone, she “wrote with a cool head in accordance with the principle that the lower the temperature of her prose, the higher the emotional voltage it could carry.” … Read More
Category: memoir
“Denial was a talent she greatly admired. She could have been Gentile, except, of course, she wasn’t.”
How does a humorist write about death? This is what I wondered when I opened Delia Ephron‘s memoir, which has a piece called “Losing Nora” about her famous sister. She relies a lot on the formula that we see in the quote above: she starts by saying the opposite … Read More
“…I lived in a series of all-decisive moments, and the intensity was so great that sometimes life felt almost unlivable….”
This is not a book for readers who hate getting lost when a scene on page 105 doesn’t get resolved until page 340. It is for readers who would like to see how a literary genius describes the challenges and boredom of a normal life. The story’s structure consists of … Read More
“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.”
In the tenth anniversary edition of the memoir The Liar’s Club, Mary Karr writes, “Just as the novel form once took up experiences of urban industrialized society that weren’t being addressed in sermons or epistles or epic poems, so memoir — with its single, intensely personal voice — wrestles … Read More
“Don’t begin with an idea: begin with the point of the pen touching paper.”
Uniquely in America, there is “a desire to understand in the heat of living,” says Natalie Goldberg in her book about the practice of writing memoir. Don’t think of memoirs as records of events. Instead, think of it as a chance to make sense of your life and search for … Read More
“Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows.”
The passage continues: “That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself.” This book, the autobiography of Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, reminds me of Proust. He describes things in great detail — including his faults and … Read More
“Reflection is a mighty endeavor…no occupation is more powerful or more feeble, depending on the soul”
“Not a week goes by without my telling a lie, but I suppose that is the same for most people.”
Under what circumstances do you lie? This book shows how our tendencies to lie can be influenced by the culture we live in. Kyoko Mori describes situations in her home country of Japan, where it’s more important to be polite than honest, especially with people who have authority over you. … Read More
“Terror and beauty are woven into the fringes of things both great and small.”
I have been drawn to this book by Annie Dillard many times, and I continue to appreciate the ideas and the poetic quality of the prose. My favorite chapter is “Seeing.” For her, seeing leads to understanding, which then leads to transformation. Her closing lines describe being moved by the … Read More
“Trust that the presence of long-held stories in your memories are there for reasons beyond entertainment.”
John Dewey, one of my heroes, said that you don’t learn from experience — you learn from thinking about your experience. That’s the idea that What Our Stories Teach Us is based on. Linda K. Shadiow outlines a three-step process of description, interpretation, and analysis. Is this sort of reflection … Read More