Were my reading assignments interesting? Moving? Inspiring? These are the questions I ask myself after teaching literature classes. I hope my students will experience the sort of engagement that Eudora Welty describes here. She writes about spending an afternoon in the library reading Yeats and feeling so absorbed by the … Read More
Category: memoir
“Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.”
It is easier to blame people for making mistakes than it is to consider the role that policies play in determining outcomes. Ibram X. Kendi writes, “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy” (28). For example, when my book club discussed of … Read More
“What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”
To say that Tara Westover’s dad demanded complete obedience to his rules and doctrine would be an understatement. When one of his children disobeyed, he assumed it could be due to one thing only: the work of the devil. He is a person most of us would dismiss … Read More
Best Books of 2019: Five Favorites
Here are the five books I’ve recommended most frequently in 2019:
Novel: It appears that Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House is on every “Best of 2019” list. What makes it so appealing? In addition to having likable, open-hearted characters in an interesting situation — which we can expect from Patchett … Read More
“But what is the truth of our social existence?”
Why would anyone invest a large percentage of their reading time in Knausgaard’s 3600-page novel? Is it worth it? I started reading it because I was curious about this Norwegian writer’s experiment with a new form of writing, which emphasizes frankness, speed, quantity, and courage. I continued reading because … Read More
Best Books of 2018: Five Favorites
The books I have recommended most often to my friends this year are:
Pioneers! Strong families! Resourcefulness! I’ve always been drawn to the stories of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and I’ve often recommended her books to those who are learning to write memoirs. I’m rethinking all of that after reading Prairie … Read More
“To live the complete human catastrophe is terrible indeed, but to write about it?”
Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian writer who conducted a public experiment. He wanted to see what would happen if he wrote honestly about his life, aiming to “penetrate that whole series of conceptions and ideas and images that hang like a sky above reality” in a six-volume novel. On … Read More
“By turning the experiment of life into a heroic task he was able to turn Walden from a philosophical tract of unattainable goals into a guide for the perplexed.”
Jeffrey Cramer argues that if you read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as an autobiographical record, you are bound to be disappointed. (After all, Thoreau was selective about what he included, and the bits he didn’t write about – such as having his sisters do his laundry – seem to undercut … Read More
“I can still see the frame of the arch between the living room and the hall bending maniacally the closer I approached.”
Hisham Matar, author of The Return, continues his description of the year after his father had been kidnapped by Qaddafi’s supporters, when the family didn’t know whether the father was dead or alive. “Any repetitive movement increased my heartbeat. Looking out of the window, I had to make … Read More
“As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover.”
How can a writer who spent all but six years of her life in the same house, living what she herself describes as a “sheltered life,” create such astonishing fiction? In her memoir, One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty answers this question by arguing that a quiet life “can be … Read More
“There are many of us who need to reprocess our garbage, but who can’t bear the idea of writing 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