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
Category: memoir
“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
“. . . 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…”
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 to receive a Nobel Prize” for his six-part series. … Read More
“The first element is integrity of intention.”
“The problem is that an interesting life doesn’t make an interesting memoir.”
William Zinsser, author of Writing About Your Life, continues, “Only small pieces of a life make an interesting memoir.” Rather than attempting to write about important periods of history, “be content to tell your small portion of a larger story.” (16) Choose to write about “small, self contained … Read More
“My memory is an archipelago.”
Arranging everything in chronological order in memoirs can be, well, boring. The challenge is finding an alternative structural method that doesn’t bewilder readers. The author of this memoir takes a bold approach: she gives us many tiny stories/reflections/anecdotes as stand-alone chapters, and she lets us draw our own conclusions and … Read More
“One of the saddest sentences I know is ‘I wish I had asked my mother about that.'”
William Zinsser, a writer’s writer if there ever was one, died this week. I wonder how many of the authors whose books are featured in this blog have read or taught from On Writing Well. I agree with the editors and teachers who believe that this book ought to … Read More