"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." — Stephen King
When Diana Athill says she has no regrets at age 89, I tend to believe her, though it is, of course, an audacious thing to say. She says that she has more common sense than … Read More
Imagine that you saved a box of the printouts of all the emails that you wrote to your former fiancé in 1990s. Now, more than twenty years later, would you read them? This is a beautiful set-up … Read More
When Kyoko Mori writes about her love for her cats and birds, she doesn’t hold back. Her devotion is unquestionably…well…obsessive. It’s tempting to see her in that light only. However, in an interview, Mori says this, “I … Read More
Anna Quindlen says that when Barry Jenkins was filming The Underground Railroad, he directed the actors to “Show me yourselves.” In other words, don’t act. Similarly, Quindlen recommends doing the kind of writing where you don’t posture for an audience. Just write the truth. Privately. For yourself. This is … Read More
More than 400 years ago, Michel de Montaigne of France invented a new literary tradition of close inward observation. “It is a thorny undertaking,” he writes, “to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind.” Scholars, such as Sarah Bakewell, credit him with being the first to experiment … Read More
I nearly fell off my chair when I read this statement in Stephen King’s book On Writing. It provides such a sharp contrast to the 20 other books I’ve been reading on the subject of writing memoirs. Because I’m working on my own book on this subject, I’ve been … Read More
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
