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
Category: memoir
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
“We understand ourselves, our lives, retrospectively.”
This is an interesting statement, considering it’s from someone who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for her column “Public and Private,” in which she explored different ways to understand her life and the world at large in the heat of the present tense. I read her work regularly then, … Read More
“I had to live on the lip of a waterfall, exhausted.”
You might expect a coming-of-age book to have a plot, to describe the who-what-when-where-how-and-why. But Annie Dillard is not a typical person, nor is her book a typical memoir. She concentrated on describing how she wanted to notice and remember everything. Her goal was to “break up through the skin … Read More
“The sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate — four to six hours a day, every day — will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things…”
Not since Charles Dickens has a writer had so many readers “by the throat,” observed a British review of this classic by Stephen King. Having sold more than 350 million books, King could be considered an expert at many things, perhaps chiefly at developing and maintaining a vivid imagination. The … Read More
“What is the rudest question you can ask a woman?”
“They had built the entire foundation of their country on isolationism and wanting to kill Americans and South Koreans, yet they needed to learn English and feed their children with foreign money.”
When Suki Kim’s wrote about the six months she was as a teacher in North Korea, she was haunted by the idea that her book might lead to the punishment or even the death of her former students, who could be punished for knowing too much about the world. For … 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
“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