Who better to write a book about writing memoirs than Judith Barrington? She can speak from experience as an author and teacher. In this book, which is widely used in college courses and has sold more than 100,000 copies, she speaks to those who “aspire to the highest literary … Read More
Tag: Memoir
“That was my mistake.”
Some memoirs resemble novels — they build a story with a beginning, a middle, and an ending. The challenge for the writer is to make it interesting for readers who already know the ending. In the case of Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett, the reader knows from the book’s … Read More
“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
“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