Tag: Memoir
Memoir: Do You Tell?
How do you choose to alert people who appear in your books that you are writing about them—or do you not alert them at all?
A Farm Dies Once a Year
The new memoir A Farm Dies Once a Year, by Arlo Crawford, is, according to the Washington Post, “elegant and richly detailed.” Amazon.com describes it as an intimate, gorgeously observed memoir about family and farming that forms a powerful lesson in the hard-earned risks that make life worth living: The …
Mary Karr: ‘For Our People to Do Anything to Generate Income That Won’t Land You in Prison, It’s a Win’
What an interesting read, this Paris Review interview with Mary Karr, author of The Liars’ Club: A Memoir. It’s not a new article; I just stumbled upon it. An excerpt from the interview: INTERVIEWER Did you tell your family you were going to write about them? KARR I’d warned my …
Writing & Reading Memoir
It’s heartfelt stuff, hearing a person’s stories and learning what they mean to the person.
Memoir: Isabella Bird in the Sandwich Islands
“There is also a dog, but he does not understand English.”— Isabella Bird, from The Hawaiian Archipelago
Zinsser, Memoirs & ‘No Project Too Weird’
An autobiography summarizes and tells the whole of a person’s life. It is the story of a life. A memoir has a narrower focus, and tells a story “from a life.” Author (and memoir writer) Gore Vidal describes the difference this way: “A memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dated, facts double-checked.”
