Quotes About Memoir

On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I've seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature - why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir?

I can be very snobby about fiction, especially contemporary fiction. I can be kind of overly demanding, I think. But this is, I think, a good time. A lot of fiction comes out right now. So, I like reading the memoir. I love memoir, the biography, auto bio.

I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

But it's hard for me to pinpoint where all my characters and dialogue come from - imagination or real life. My memoir, of course, was all about my past, and many of the short stories cleave very closely to my life, but the more stories I wrote in the collection, the more that seemed to be invented, but who knows... I think I'm writing about a young woman with acne who shoplifts, but I'm really writing about myself.

My first memoir, 'Home,' was about my childhood, early training and formative years in the Theater, i am so pleased that my good friends at the Hachette Book Group have encouraged me to share the next phase of my life, beginning with my arrival in Hollywood and the wonderful movies and television programs I was asked to be a part of.

Bob Dylan wrote in his elliptical memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, he was washed up in the 1980s, no longer a commercial success, and no longer putting out good work.

It's beyond the grasp of anyone's memory to recall conversations in kind of [memoir] detail. So it's fake. It's all made up.

I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if your life story would be lived on the edge of possibility, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in the other and truly believed that anything was possible.

Now the truth is, writing is a great way to deal with a lot of difficult emotional issues. It can be very therapeutic, but that's best done in your journal, or on your blog if you're an exhibitionist. Trying to put a bunch of *specific* stuff from your personal life into your story usually just isn't appropriate unless you're writing a memoir or a personal essay or something of the sort.

I didn't find this memoir of these two eccentric people so different from doing my memoirs of De Sade or Simone Weil. My parents in their own way are as odd as Sade.

I think that today's books, in which every quote, every conversation, is taken from a memoir, an autobiography, an interview, or what-have-you, are much more convincing.

I believe that the memoir is the novel of the 21st century; it’s an amazing form that we haven’t even begun to tap…we’re just getting started figuring out what the rules are.

I'd written Smashed not because I was ambitious and not because writing down my feelings was cathartic (it felt more like playing one's own neurosurgeon sans anesthesia). No. I'd made a habit--and eventually a profession--of memoir because I hail from one of those families where shows of emotions are discouraged.

I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.

I think that the celebrity memoir as a genre is looked upon as a lesser form. One of my missions as a ghostwriter has been to elevate that form. Maybe that sounds pretentious!

Writing a memoir has a particularly excited sense of narcissism.

Memoir is a unique opportunity to revisit yourself. I don't mean by memory. I mean in the revision process. You don't just write a chapter and that's it. You must constantly return to it. You must dote on it. And even if it's saying something ugly about who you are, you have to find the poetry in it. You have to find the poetry in yourself.

When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.

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.

A memoir should have some uplifting quality, inspiring or illuminating, and that's what separates a life story that can influence other people.

A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.

The contemporary memoir is playing an important role in at least just bringing certain relationships out into the open in American society, and also it's a place where the novel of development, the novel of consciousness, has gone.

The materials of true poetry are always humble, absolutely idiosyncratic, the autobiographical tatters that, in gifted hands, are made into the memoir that fits us all.

Speaking specifically about the memoir, I know that's a criticism that people can have about my work. When I look at the young men's lives, if they're reduced to the worst thing they've done, then it's easy for them to become a stereotype. I keep running into that with newspaper articles that are very short.