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.
For me, a memoir is nonfiction and nonfiction has to be absolutely true.
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.
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.
I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
I love memoirs and autobiographies in general.
No one knows the author of memoir so well like himself.
I live my memoirs, I don’t have to write them down.
I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.
We all have love stories that go terribly wrong; we all have horribly broken hearts. And somehow we endure. We're not destroyed by it. We endure and go on to do interesting things and have worthy lives, even though we carry our heartbreaks with us. That's a kind of personal story of mine that I don't think I would tell in memoir but I do think I can tell in fiction.
This week Sarah Palin's memoir became a bestseller. It's not even out yet. It's being translated into English.
I will leave no memoirs.
For me, the showbiz memoir is uninteresting - you want to tell people something they don't know about.
One of the things I write about a bit in my Madam Secretary memoir is on Rwanda, where I was an instructed ambassador at the U. N. , and my instructions were to not vote for increased forces there, and I didn't like my instructions. So I got up and called Washington and said, "Change my instructions," and they didn't.
Yet one new trend I do like coming from mainstream publishers right now is memoirs tied to research that explores the narrator's dilemma.
I don't think you can take a whole genre of very popular books and say, "This is all trash!" When we read a memoir that isn't by a celebrity, we feel like we're about to go on a journey and we don't know where the journey will lead. But when we read a memoir by a celebrity we feel like we already know the journey and we just want to travel it.
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.
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.
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.
The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.