True memoir is written, like all literature, in an attempt to find not only a self but a world

You can’t put much on paper before you betray your secret self, try as you will to keep things civil.

Memory is, first, a captivating mystery.

A careful first draft is a failed first draft

I could tell you stories-if only stories could tell what I have in me to tell.

The artist's work, it is sometimes said, is to celebrate. But really that is not so; it is to express wonder. And something terrible resides at the heart of wonder. Celebration is social, amenable. Wonder has a chaotic splendor.

Memoir is trustworthy and its truth assured when it seeks the relation of self to time, the piecing of the shards of personal experience into the starscape of history's night. The materials of memoir are humble, fugitive, a cottage knitting industry seeking narrative truth across the crevasse of time as autobiography folds itself into the vast, fluid essay that is history. A single voice singing its aria in a corner of the crowded world.