One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can’t drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.
The Canadian version of Julius Caesar's memoirs? I came, I saw, I coped.
I don't like talking about myself; I like to let the music be the spokesperson for me. So doing a memoir and all that chronological 'and then this happened and then blah blah' doesn't appeal to me that much. I think there's more mystique in what you don't know about.
Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.
Memoir is about handing over you life to someone and saying, This is what I went through, this is who I am, and maybe you can learn something from it.
When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do.
No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.
I believe a good memoir should have all of the narrative elements of a novel: character development, dialogue, descriptive language, and metaphor.
I don't read memoirs. But if you write a memoir, I would think you'd want people to know, "O. K. , look, I've taken some liberties here. " It's just a matter of being open with your readers.
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.
Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.
There are so many stories that need to be told and are not being told. We tend to want to put things in boxes: "This is a memoir about a Muslim," or "This is a memoir about a woman or a normal personal. " There's a certain story that assumes to be universal. Everyone else is ethnic fiction. Anyone can aspire to universality.
Memoir. . . satisfies our need for gossip and intimacy, for testimony and confessional, and in this world of spin, offers a truthful account of what it means to succeed or fail, to love and lose, to break your heart and mend it again.
Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel.
The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.
I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.
If you're going to write a memoir, try to be as honest and open as you can.
I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
Let no family go into eternity without having left their memoirs for their children, their grandchildren, and their posterity.
Much more than memoir; it's history.