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Susan Shapiro teaches writing. She also gives advice. Since her advice in the online version of The Writer magazine underscores the premise of this blog–that to be a good memoir writer it helps to read 100 great memoirs–I offer this link to the ten things not to do as a memoir writer.
Enjoy! If you are on Facebook, join The Writer’s fan page, and you will get sweet little tidbits like this one without having to come here to find them.
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I had the great good fortune this weekend to attend the Bear River Writers’ Conference
, about which I will say more later. Sue Silverman, author of two bestselling memoirs, led an excellent workshop on memoir. I purchased and will review her craft book Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir at a later time.
In that book you will find a marvelous list, which Sue kindly shares on her own website. She uses this list in her courses on creative nonfiction at Vermont College of the Arts.
Here is the list itself, copied from Sue’s website. Note that she has divided memoir into nine separate categories and at the bottom includes a list of journals. So helpful! Thanks, Sue, for sharing yourself and your knowledge so generously with your students and for compiling this wonderful list. You can also click on links on the right hand column that will allow you to get more acquainted with Sue and her work.
For those of you interested in other lists, from Mary Karr and other writers and readers, you can find the ones collected so far in this blog under the list tag.
Reading ListSUE WILLIAM SILVERMAN’S CONTEMPORARY CREATIVE NONFICTION READING LIST
Illness, Accident, Grief, Addiction
Isabel Allende, Paula Family, Relationships, Friendships, Identity
Laurie Alberts, Fault Line Childhood and Coming of Age
Marvin V. Arnett, Pieces from Life’s Crazy Quilt Place, Nature, Science, Travel
Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire New Journalism, Immersion, History, Social Issues, War, Political Issues, Religion, Spirituality, Feminism Faith Adiele, Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun Experimental, Montage, Lyric, Hybrid Forms
David B., Epileptic Personal Essay, Journal, Anthologies
Faith Adiele, Coming of Age Around the World Humor
Stephen Akey, College Occupational Memoirs
Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Teacher Literary Journals specifically for Nonfiction Brevity: A Journal of concise Literary Nonfiction (750 words or less per piece, an online journal) |
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Every so often I “Google” key words related to this blog–like “best memoirs,” “ memoir blogs,” and “top ten memoirs.”
If you do the same–Google “best memoirs”–right now, you will come across this article in the Wall Street Journal by new memoirist Norris Church Mailer. I have not read her memoir about life with her husband Norman Mailer, but I am intrigued by the reviews, especially by this one in the New York Times.
Here’s my favorite quip from Alex Witchel’s review above: “That she managed to stay with Mailer — self-obsessed, self-aggrandizing, perennially womanizing to the point of even his own humiliation — for almost 33 years until his death in 2007 was a feat most women would not have attempted. When people asked, ‘Which wife are you?’ her answer was, ‘The last one.’”
Increasingly, memoirists are being asked about their own favorite memoirs. I try to take note when this happens and share the suggestions here. Right now one of the most frequently checked posts at 100memoirs is Mary Karr’s Top Ten List.
If you know of other lists, please share them. And continue to offer your own!
0 Thanks to Richard Gilbert, whose wonderful blog Narrative I highly recommend, I can include a link guaranteed to induce a chuckle.
One of the goals of this blog focuses on the quest to understand memoir as a genre. What differentiates it from other forms? Why is it both popular and maligned in the contemporary literary world? I named this category “books about memoir,” and you can find the posts stored in this category by using the handy category list in the right-hand column. Or you can follow this link to find previous posts which reviewed those books, sometimes commenting on how they define the genre.
I have cited a few other writers on this subject, but none of the definitions in these posts were as fun as these from Chris Offutt as taken from Harper’s. Open the link and enjoy a laugh.
Do these definitions work as well as the serious ones for you? What do they reveal that the others lack? Or vice versa?
Scroll slowly over this picture. Do you recognize the famous film critic Roger Ebert?
I knew that Ebert had battled cancer, lost weight, and kept on going. What I did not know, until I saw that picture and read the article in Esquire about him, was that he has also lost his physical voice and most of his jaw, not to mention that he struggles with his hip and shoulder, unable, now, to sit for any extended period.
This photo was a shock, partly because his website continues to show him with an intact jaw and partly because I have read more of and about Roger Ebert this year than at any other time, without knowing he had lost his physical voice. Essays, reviews, and blog posts, written with clarity, urgency, and love, have been pouring out of him. I highly recommend the February 16, 2010, article in Esquire by Chris Jones, an intimate portrait of Ebert which may make you ponder, once again, the paradox of finding your life by losing your life.
Look at Ebert’s eyes in this photo and you will recognize the windows to his soul, the part of his face that cancer has not touched, except, perhaps to deepen the pools of wisdom, humor, and warmth contained therein. Cancer has also not touched his mind nor his creative energy. He uses his laptop like a lifeline. No longer able to be televised or recorded, he now “speaks” through his fingers.
“The greatest films are meditations on why we are here,” says Ebert. As his own experience on earth contracts and draws nearer to the end (consciously now), his voice takes on the kind of compassionate strength we recognize from our best teachers, their love of life, and their desire to share the best of who they are and what they know.
Two thoughts about Ebert relevant especially to our own pursuit of the best of memoir in this blog.
1. His top 100 list of movies assumes that 100 outstanding examples of a genre, explored in depth, create a curriculum that anyone else can learn from. Johnny Cash used the same method to teach his daughter the classics of country music. Bennington College offers one of the best low residency MFA programs in the country and uses this motto: “Read one hundred books. Write one.” Isn’t that a great curriculum in six words?
I feel confirmed in the use of 100 memoirs as a teaching/learning device. However, it’s easy to feel daunted by the depth of knowledge required to take on such a task. To get to the list of 100, both Ebert and Cash, spent their entire lives listening and watching much that never made it to their lists. By contrast, I’ve gotten a late start, but everytime I come across another “top 100 list,” I feel empowered to continue the quest. With the help of guest bloggers and great commenters, however, it seems like an attainable goal. If you click on the next link, you will see Ebert’s own great website with a feature I would like to add to this blog some day–all 100 movies (for me it will be memoirs) in a clickable list that takes you to a review post about that movie. What a great resource. You can also find a printable version of just the movies themselves to add to your Netflix queue or take with you to the store. It took him 13 years to construct this list, adding a new one every two weeks. It might take me as long, but what fun!
2. Ebert’s has taken his calling to find meditations on “why we are here” in darkened movie theaters to new depths as he has fought for his life in the last four years. He says, at the end of the Esquire interview essay, that he has no desire to write his memoir, although he has been encouraged by many to do so. His approach to memoir is appealing to me, and becoming more so all the time. He has shared many personal experiences in individual essays and blog posts. He doesn’t want to revisit these essays or to impose a larger narrative arc on them in order to create a book memoir. If you want a great example of online memoir essay, read his confession of being an alcoholic here.
If you add up the online personal essays, the Esquire interview, and the top 100 best movie reviews, you have lots of ways to understand Roger Ebert’s own raison d’etre. It’s own very similar to my own. I’ve stolen it from Wordsworth’s long memoir poem, The Prelude:
“What we have loved, others will love
and we will teach them how.”
How would you answer the question, “Why are you here?” Have other people’s memoirs shed any light on this question for you?
0 For those of you searching the web for “top memoir” reading lists, here is a new resource. Angela Kelsey, a Twitter friend, is challenging herself to review 24 memoirs in the next 28 days. She has reached Day 4 already, and the quality of both the books and reviews will reward your reading effort. Check out her list here.
At the end of the 28 days, Kelsey will be defending her thesis–her own memoir–in an MFA program. Let’s not only wish her luck, let’s learn from her experiences and grow our own list of important memoirs. Crowdsourcing coaching–I like that name for the same thing I have been doing in this blog. Teaching myself as I share what I learn.
The goal of reading and writing about 100 memoirs was the initial driver of this blog. If you want more lists than Kelsey’s, move to the right on this page and click on the category called “lists.”
Can you add other lists? Your own or ones you have found online?
1 If you are looking for the 100 best memoirs, you are coming to the right place. We are making progress building not only one list but many! Several of the posts in this blog include lists, and here is another blogger’s list with annotations. You surely will find something to your taste in this list of seventy memoirs! http://memorywritersnetwork.com/blog/annotated-list-memoirs/
Jerry Waxler’s blog, Memory Writer’s Network, linked above, is one to add to your Google Reader or blog roll. His posts are always carefully written and insightful.
5 If you are an author or hoping to become one, you are entering a field in great flux. Maybe chaotic is not too strong a word to describe the world of publishing right now. In such a time, a good guide makes all the difference. Seth Godin, who has written ten bestsellers, using totally new marketing methods such as sending Purple Cow milk cartons in the mail and giving away e-books for free, understands the new rules extraordinarily well. He’s making them up as he goes.
It’s hard enough to be a writer, you may say. Do I really need to be a blogger and marketer also?? Well, no, if you are Anne Lamott or Kathleen Norris or Mary Karr. But if you are not already established, you may benefit enormously by understanding some of Seth Godin’s principles. By embedding the video he republished on his blog, I hope to help memoir readers and writers benefit. And I am giving him permission, a concept he coined, to continue marketing creative publishing ideas.
What do you think? Will you try any of these ideas? Did you get inspired?
2 Sharing writing tips is one of the goals of this blog. So today I pass along a few tips from the National Association of Memoir Writers. I recently joined this organization out of interest in finding other memoir writers and locating expertise in the genre. I look forward to exploring the blog, CD’s, teleseminars, newsletters and other benefits. In addition, I am reading the memoir sent by the founder of NAMW, Linda Joy Myers, called Don’t Call Me Mother. 
Myers is a psycho-therapist and writer whose book Becoming Whole: Writing Your Healing Story was reviewed here. She approaches writing as a form of therapy and helps prospective writers develop the courage and the skills to tell the truth as they remember it.
Another item that came with my membership is a list of Myers’ 23 memoir writing tips. I don’t think she will mind if I share her first three:
1. Write frequent vignette–small, do-able pieces
2. Use the timeline to organize your memories and stories.
3. Find the dark and light in each story as well as identify stories that are primarily dark or light.
This list confirmed the approach I have taken here (mostly from intuition and trial-and-error) to start small. A blog is a perfect place to explore and share memories, even if they still need editing and shaping before they may be ready for other forms of publication.
Do you have a place to store and record your own mini-memoirs? What other tips have you discovered about writing? Have you ever created a timeline of your stories?
10 Let me begin with an apology for slacking off on blogging this past week. I probably will continue a low profile until June 30th, after an important board meeting, and after I have finished a book review to send to Christian Century.
But how lovely it would be if we together could make some progress toward the ultimate book list we want to construct here–a list that amounts to the top 100 memoirs in our collective opinions.
You could be enormously helpful by submitting names of memoirs you love and why you love them. They can be classic or contemporary. If you can come up with five or ten names, that would even be better. To get you started, here’s one list of 40 already published online.
But this short video and blog entry from CBC are even better. Watch/read it, and you will see both some great suggestions and outstanding memoir short reviews–and a methodology I would like to copy. The CBC Top Ten List was created by readers and viewers, not by any one single “expert.”
What is your favorite memoir? Why? Do you have a top ten or top five list to share? While I write my review, you can be reviewing your own bookselves and memories.
Prize alert! I will give away another memoir from my shelf–this time I will judge instead of asking for votes. Criteria? The most complete and insightful list.
