Ten Years of Writing about Memoir Has Taught Me This

December 12, 2023

Memoir is the most entrepreneurial form of writing. It attracts inventors who are willing to take risks and use nontraditional skills and interests. Though their goal might be as simple as recording history, or telling stories, or finding meaning, their materials are original. They … Read More

“We get the Dialectic fairly well.”

November 29, 2023

Why would a poem written in 1940 be included in The Best American Poetry 2023?  W. H. Auden’s brilliant poem about contradictions wasn’t published during his lifetime because he questioned its value. Auden was a great poet who doubted his greatness. Even when he won awards, … Read More

“I’ve spent my whole life studying her . . . because I always want to do whatever I can in any given moment to make or keep Mom happy.”

November 20, 2023

What happens when a stand-up comedy routine becomes a memoir? In this case, it becomes a best-seller. This book started as a one-woman show about growing up trying to please a mother who was her best friend and controller of everything from showers to diet to … Read More

“Memories are then replaced by different joys and sorrows, and unbelievably . . . you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.”

November 6, 2023

This novel makes us ask: which versions of our memories are to be believed? Is it really true that the protagonist has all that she’s ever wanted? Is she hiding something? From whom? I disagree with the reviewer who described this novel as “bucolically simple.” What about … Read More

“Where does the road to ruin start?”

October 31, 2023

This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is written as a recovery journal by a young man in Appalachia who was born to a single mother experiencing addiction. It’s the story that author Barbara Kingsolver wanted to write for years because every family she knows in her part of … Read More

“…I see in the flashlight beam, a world of dust . . . massing, revolving back, splitting into twos and threes and lonely ones—”

October 26, 2023

The poet Rasma Haidri continues, “and I know I orchestrated this fugue of spheres.” I love the way hope infuses this poem – and many of the poems – in this collection. We see stories about people who are looking for greater happiness, and who are finally … Read More

“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”

October 16, 2023

Because we all make questionable decisions from time to time, it’s only natural to wonder if we are our own worst enemy, or if we are the hero in our life, or something in between. Many memoirs begin with this question.  However, this book is not a … Read More

“I live on the boundary of the outside and the inside.”

September 29, 2023

I’ve always believed that the best way to take the pulse of a bookstore is to check out the display on the front table. Instead of best-sellers, this bookstore featured Czech poets – a treat for someone like me who knows virtually nothing about the literary traditions … Read More

“I had lost my self-confidence where you were concerned, had traded it for a boundless sense of guilt

September 14, 2023

I’ve been thinking about Kafka’s story about turning into an insect this week, and why he would write a story about a young man who shamed his family by turning into a useless cockroach. A Czech bookstore had a book-length letter that Kafka wrote to his father… Read More

“One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin.”

September 11, 2023

This story about a man who turned into a type of insect has been called surreal, humorous. a horror story, neurotic, and “the greatest short story in the history of literary fiction.” I visited a museum devoted t0 Kafka in Prague. It was the weirdest, most unpleasant … Read More

“Then she leaned over and bit him hard on the cheek.”

August 31, 2023

Even though this biography of novelist Barbara Pym was picked as a “Best Book of the Year 2021” by the London Times, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph, I was initially reluctant to read it. I didn’t want to learn things that would make me … Read More

“I expect you to beat the odds. That’s my gift to you, in fact, that gift of expectations.”

August 17, 2023

At the end of this novel, Peter Sullivan tells the hard-scrabble students in his English class that he believes in them and expects them to succeed, even if no one else has ever had faith in them before. What a wonderful gift! In fact, in the … Read More

“I have learned,” said the Philosopher, “that the head does not hear anything until the heart has listened, and that what the heart knows to-day, the head will understand to-morrow.”

August 4, 2023

Interesting ideas sparkle throughout this novel. Here are two examples: “Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will” and “…for life may not be consecutive, but explosive and variable, else it is a shackled and timorous slave.” It was written a hundred years ago by … Read More

“You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully.”

July 27, 2023

The last word of this sentence stunned me. The Annie Dillard I know is one of the boldest writers. Could she experience fear when writing? She does. She says, “In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles.” Then, she looks for … Read More

“Fiction . . . is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web . . .”

July 20, 2023

Virginia Woolf continues, “attached ever so lightly, perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves.” It’s only when the web is torn in the middle, says Woolf,  that … Read More