‘Out of Africa,’ Dinesen’s second book, is a love story, though not the one portrayed by Streep and Redford in the film. The memoir is about Dinesen’s love of East Africa – the cultures, the landscapes, the animals. The feeling that saturates the book is reverence.
The first novel I wrote, ‘The White House Mess,’ was a comic novel. It came out in 1986. It was a parody in the form of a White House memoir.
‘Duty’ is a refreshingly honest memoir and a moving one. Mr. Gates scrupulously identifies his flaws and mistakes: He waited too long, for example, for the military bureaucracy to fix critical supply issues like the drones needed in Iraq and took three years to replace a dysfunctional command structure in Afghanistan.
Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
Being a writer is a very difficult craft. Just like learning an instrument, it takes a long time and I couldn’t really say I was a writer even after my first memoir.
I’ve yet to read a memoir by anyone I’ve known at all well that came anywhere near to the truth.
Dylan’s ‘Chronicles’ is easily the best rock n’ roll memoir ever written, as far as I’m concerned. There aren’t many stories in there, but if you want to know where an artist came from and why he thinks the way he does, then that’s the one.
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.
I never thought I would write a memoir at age 40… but I did have this unique place in history.
The term ‘celebrity memoir’ has gotten such a bad name now, but there used to be a little bit of an art form to it.
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.
A memoir is an invitation into another person’s privacy.
You don’t have to be a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to figure out that when you title a memoir of your parents ‘Them,’ you’re performing an act of distancing.
When you start a memoir, you think, ‘I’m going to blast all the people who were mean to me.’ And then you start writing, and you go, actually, it’s so much more fun to say nice things about people who were kind and generous to 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.
I’ve read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves’s memoir ‘Goodbye to All That,’ and a civilian memoir, ‘Testament of Youth,’ by Vera Brittain.
The memoir industry is, what’s the word? Under regulated. I think it needs to be pruned. If there are too many books right now and the market for readers is shrinking, I think we can get rid of many of the memoirs. Another memoir should be awfully well justified before it gets published.
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.
Moms in fiction and memoir get a bad rap.
I stayed at ‘Cosmo’ well beyond my internship, moving up the ranks over some 15 years to become books editor, then brand director, then editor-at-large – editing everything from an excerpt of Gore Vidal’s memoir to writing some of those juicy cover lines myself.
‘Something Borrowed’ was initially titled ‘Rolling the Dice,’ but my editor said it sounded like a men’s gambling memoir.
I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.
Accuse a person of breaking all Ten Commandments, and you’ve written the promo blurb for the dust cover of his tell-all memoir.
Most memoir writers will tell you that the hardest part of writing a memoir isn’t what to include, but what to leave out.
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it’s much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
I had a very high-grade publisher tell me I was incapable of writing a memoir.
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.
My memoir is about my time in film and the decision to leave Hollywood, grow up, and stop pretending.
My book ‘Trust Your Heart’, which is the story of my life, will be followed by ‘Singing Lessons’, a memoir of love, loss, hope, and healing, which talks about the death of my son and the hope that has been the aftermath of the healing from that tragedy.
In a memoir, your main contract with the reader is to tell the truth, no matter how bizarre.
Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that’s what – that whole oversharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder. And I’m not saying that every, you know, I’m not accusing every memoirist of being bipolar. But I think in a way it’s kind of a gift.
By the time I wrote my memoir, ‘Men We Reaped,’ I had been running from writing it for a long time. When the events in the book were happening, I knew I’d probably write about them one day. I didn’t want to. I’d studied fiction, and I was committed to establishing myself as a fiction writer first.
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars – or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.
The idea of a memoir is to tell the truth. I know that often the truth hurts, but a lie hurts even more.
A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.
Fiction isn’t memoir and memoir isn’t fiction.
I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It’s about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.
Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it’s intimidating to think of adapting it for television.
The biggest takeaway from a memoir is that you have to play fair. Within the first draft, I was writing very angrily because I had a lot of resentment and a lot to process. Through revision is where a lot of learning happened and a lot of forgiveness happened.
If you bill something as a memoir, you’re implying that everything in it is true.
I read The Bell Jar, and then I read her memoir and her diaries, and a third book, an outside opinion. Just the way she made the pillows so neat on the oven door. It just seems to be the opposite of, if you’re going to take your life, in a horrible rage it happens.
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.
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 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.
Anyone who tries to write a memoir needs to keep in mind that what’s interesting to you isn’t necessarily interesting to a reader.
It might surprise people to know that the person who convinced me to write the third memoir – ‘The Hardcore Diaries’ – was actually Vince McMahon.
A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.
I was told that my best-case scenario would likely consist of writing my memoir and then disappearing.
Pages: 1 2
