Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.
I don't really read Stephen King - I just can't read scary things because it stays with me too long - but I truly liked his memoir of the craft of writing.
In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.
I'm not one of those people who's so blinded by my own work and my sweat. It's kind of risky writing a memoir when you're really part of a larger universe.
When anybody starts out with a memoir, you get the impulse to tell your own story with your own voice, and you get all that out in one fell swoop sometimes.
In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.
I'm making a kind of a memoir of certain aspects and times in my life. Now that I'm older I can look back and analyze some things, and see the root of things.
I think most memoirs, though they purport to be about this particular time or this person you met, are really about the effect that person or time had on you.
One of the most challenging aspects of writing a memoir is finding your own voice, and you should be very careful about being influenced by someone else's voice.
Book Everything is Flammable is an odd format though, not quite a diary and not quite a memoir. I was working on it as it was happening. This was gratifying to me.
As irony would have it, the very person who inspired me to write a memoir... was the only person to be ejected from it. My brother didn't appear in 'Out of Egypt.'
When I published my first book, a memoir, the experience taught me that writing something of any significant length was an endurance sport as much as anything else.
There is a lot of scepticism today as to whether memoir is real. But when fiction is done at a certain level there is scepticism as to whether it is really fiction.
I'm halfway through Patti Smith's memoir 'Just Kids,' which is heart-stoppingly vivid. It drips with beauty and hope and devastating candour. I don't want it to end.
What is most important to me is that my narrator's voice is believable, and that, though it is clearly an absolute fiction, it has the emotional resonance of memoir.
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by JD Vance made me entirely rethink U.S. republicanism, Donald Trump and the American white working class.
I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.
I wanted to be a writer, but I kind of wanted to be a fiction writer someday, like 20 - 25 years down the line. I never thought I'd write a nonfiction memoir about Iraq.
Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.
Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.
If people call my book an actor's memoir I will be very upset. I can't bear anything too literal, so it has elements of truth and elements of fiction sitting side by side.
I don't really think of my essays as being about myself. I know it sounds insane, but I just don't think of them as a memoir. They're essays; they're not an autobiography.
Writing a memoir begins a process that doesn't necessarily end with publication. You begin to think about family life and stories and relationships, and those are ongoing.
I only read the very best music books. Donald Fagan's memoir 'Eminent Hipsters' is great. Bob Dylan's memoir 'Chronicles' and Patty Smith's 'Just Kids' are both incredible.
I've just finished my next collection, Possible Side Effects, and I'm now working on a collection of holiday stories as well as a memoir about my relationship with my father.
My memoir is a story of family and childhood, and everyone has had one of those. Mine is not the definitive version of childhood, but it's a great way to start a conversation.
Obama is a very fine writer with an excellent command of language. His memoir 'Dreams From My Father' is a fine book, but it will not rank as one of the great autobiographies.
It is such a luxury to open a new book that's highly recommended by friends - either an inspirational yet humorously self-deprecating memoir, or a page-turning piece of fiction.
I'm a layperson. I barely got out of high school. I have no business telling people what to do or my big philosophy on life. I'm certainly not going to write any sort of memoir.
For a memoir to really succeed, the author has to do such hard work before they come to the page. They have to do a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.
In all my years of cricket, I've given hundreds of interviews and done dozens of TV shows, but what you will read in my memoir are the stories and thoughts I've never shared openly.
A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.
My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.
The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.
The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
Any responsible essayist or memoir writer who's writing about herself is not just saying, 'Here's what happened,' and opening up her diary. There needs to be consideration of other people's feelings.
I have never liked the memoir form because I tend to think that memory fictionalizes anyway. Once you claim that you are writing a narrative purely from memory, you are already in the realm of fiction.
I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
A lot of my songs are very personal, always, but this one felt like a memoir. I almost called it Hallucinated Memoir. "Granny" is a hallucinated memoir. It's straight-up symbolism for my life, in many ways.
When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.
Memory is revisionist, you know. 'The Houston Kid' was based on true things that happened. But I know - from writing a memoir that I've been working on for awhile - that reconstructing memory is revisionism.
The last book I read to my mom was 'Barbara Bush: A Memoir' published by mom in 1994. It reflected on their entire life - dad going to China, running the CIA, running for Senate, running for President twice.
In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.
You're beginning to hear the tale of the common man and woman rather than the traditional memoir about the generals who just finished the war or the politicians who just rendered glorious service to the country.
My memoir is being published by Beaufort Books and will be available fall of 2015. It's about my unusual life as a child actor and how I made the unpopular choice to leave Hollywood, grow up, and stop pretending.
Coalwood, West Virginia, is the little coal-mining town where I grew up, and it was there that five other teenage boys and I famously built and launched rockets. I recounted this story in my memoir, 'Rocket Boys.'
I suppose I reached the limit of what I could do with nonfiction books, perhaps because they never felt quite intense enough - it's a journalistic enterprise, ultimately, even if you are using the memoir as a form.
One thing about humans is that we all have them - lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are).
I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.
In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.