Category Archives: memoir

“We have to keep making choices, keep transforming.”

Posted on May 11, 2017 by Kate Stover

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 … Continue reading →

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“While most children are proof of their parents’ love, I was the proof of their criminality.”

Posted on April 27, 2017 by Kate Stover

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 … Continue reading →

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“Every work of literature has both a situation and a story.”

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Kate Stover

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 … Continue reading →

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“What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean?”

Posted on October 27, 2016 by Kate Stover

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 … Continue reading →

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“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.”

Posted on July 21, 2016 by Kate Stover

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 … Continue reading →

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“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.”

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Kate Stover

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 … Continue reading →

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“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.”

Posted on April 21, 2016 by Kate Stover

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 “. . . … Continue reading →

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“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.”

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Kate Stover

Philip Levine’s essay “Entering Poetry,” describes the day he began writing about the people he had worked with in Detroit auto factories.  “When I closed my eyes and looked into the past, I did not see the blazing color of … Continue reading →

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“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.”

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Kate Stover

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. … Continue reading →

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“It’s interesting, the secrets you decide to reveal at the end of your life.”

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Kate Stover

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 … Continue reading →

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“Looking for goshawks is like looking for grace: it comes, but not often, and you don’t get to say when or how.”

Posted on February 11, 2016 by Kate Stover

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 … Continue reading →

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“Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen.”

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Kate Stover

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 … Continue reading →

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Best of 2015 Books

Posted on December 31, 2015 by Kate Stover

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 … Continue reading →

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“. . . autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened up…”

Posted on November 5, 2015 by Kate Stover

It defies the imagine: Karl Ove Knausgaard, a writer from Norway, has caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal. An article in the WSJ’s magazine named him the “2015 Literary Innovator,” declaring that he was “quite probably in line … Continue reading →

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“The first element is integrity of intention.”

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Kate Stover

Earlier this week, I attempted the impossible: at an evening writing class for adults, I addressed the topic of “telling the truth.” They wondered how much truth should be revealed. I wish now that I had brought along Inventing the … Continue reading →

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