The thing readers search for most in this blog is a list of best memoirs, whether it be Mary Karr’s, Sue Silverman’s, or my own.

But this week I was honored to have 100memoirs.com included in another list–top 50 memoir blogs from adulteducationcourse.org. The mention included a “Top Blog” badge and has brought some new readers. I’m grateful.

But I’m even more happy to have the list itself. Many of these blogs are new to me, and I plan to visit as many of them as possible over the next weeks and months. I hope you do also. The annotations show that the author has really studied the blogs, not just brushed by them.

Here’s the beginning of the post along with a link to the full list. Enjoy!

50 Best Memoir Blogs

Reading a memoir is the perfect way to learn about a stranger’s intimate secrets without being accused of stalking. If you can’t get enough of true narratives, or are interested in writing a memoir yourself, then look no further. Our list of the 50 best personal memoir blogs is full of poignant childhood tales, scandalous anecdotes, and valuable resources for any aspiring writer. They may even inspire you to write your own!

Top Five

1. La Belette Rouge: This psychotherapist and author blogs out of Los Angeles, California. A wide range of topics are touched upon, including fashion, moving across the country, and the craft of writing.
   • Why We Love It: We can’t help but laugh with this blogger — even when she presents very serious subjects, she finds a way to see the humor in them.
   • Favorite Post: Don’t read unless you are infertile, childless not by choice and/or bitter, really-don’t
2. Memory Writers Network: Targeted toward aspiring memoir writers, this blog offers great advice about embracing your own story. There are also links to many helpful writing resources.
   • Why We Love It: This blogger gives very detailed tips about making your memoir as compelling as possible.
   • Favorite Post: Self-concept and memoirs: The power of purpose
3. writing to survive: This blog began as a way for a stay-at-home mom to maintain an intellectual life. She also uses this outlet to tell a traumatic story from her past and offer forgiveness.
   • Why We Love It: The writing is full of poetic language and doesn’t shy away from selfish, lovely, and oh so human thoughts.
   • Favorite Post: In my defense
4. Sixth In Line: An interest in all things autobiographical drives this blogger. Since 2006, this blog has examined how honesty and creativity both play a role in telling the story of a life.
   • Why We Love It: Honesty and detail in the face of death and love make this blogger’s writing a thing of beauty.
   • Favorite Post: My mother/myself.
5. Mzungu Memoirs: Follow along with this family as they volunteer in Uganda. Posts range from fixing a clothesline to discussing different cultural perceptions of time and relationships.
   • Why We Love It: These bloggers take on parenting in a foreign country, which presents its own set of unique joys and challenges.
   • Favorite Post: A Rebellious Son

The Rest of the Best

• 100 Memoirs: Covering everything from memoir trust to the audio book form, this blog is a wealth of information. There are also links to this blogger’s published memoir essays.
• a road with a view: This blogger has a deft focus on the small things in life. From notes about migrating birds to a moving post about the blogger’s relationship with her mother, there is a clear sense of life in context with the outside world.
• Alexis Grant: A travel writer started this blog to share her experience writing her first memoir about backpacking through Africa. You’ll find plenty of travel writing tips, book reviews, and interviews with other writers.

Rooted in the land. Tree near Bellingham, WA.

Recently I had an inquiry from a writer who asked if I had a list of excellent first lines from memoirs. That sounded like something I should have. First words contain the vital “hook” that overcomes the reader’s resistance and skepticism. Think about how you challenge a book to speak to you when you gaze at its cover or open its first pages.

A really great memoir does more than hook the reader in the beginning. The first sentence takes you right to the heart of the matter, announcing one of the themes of the book. Often, the first paragraph in a work of art is like a haiku. It says in one breath what the whole book will say more fully as we follow the red thread of meaning.

Most of the lists of best and most famous opening lines come from novels. I shared some, and readers offered others, here. But what about memoir-specific opening lines?

Here are the first lines of some of the memoirs I selected as favorites in my personal top ten list.

Marla manages to offer some pointed critique in a very kind way. That’s not always easy, but writers really benefit from this kind of tough love. What do you think? Any feedback for Marla?

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The LA Times list was circulating on Twitter, and another list of beach books divided into categories can be found here.

And here is a special list–one from a reader, Carol Brown, who has made her own annotated list for students called “30 Moving Memoirs Every Student Should Read.”  You can find it here.

I especially encourage you to find this latter link if you are a teacher at any level who wants students to enjoy reading life stories well told as much as you do.

It’s wonderful to engage with readers and to have a gift like this list show up in my email. Thank you, Carol. And now, readers, what comments do you have on any of these books? Which ones do you want to add? Have you ever taken a memoir to the beach?

Dinty Moore, the author of many nonfiction books, editor of Brevity, and faculty member at Ohio University, found it hard to pick the top six memoirs for Amy McDaniel’s post on the Author’s Spotlight blog until he decided to pick his favorites as a way to emphasize six different approaches to the genre.

Here is a teaser to the whole post. I recommend you follow the link so that you can read about all six. You’ll have a pro to guide you–Dinty Moore.

“Narrowing my list of representative memoirs down to six was an agonizing task, because there are so many solid examples.  To keep the undertaking manageable (barely), I’ve limited myself to the last twenty years or so, and instead of a ‘favorites’ list, I’ve chosen six examples that I think show the range of what memoir can do.

My concise description of memoir is “the truth, artfully arranged.”  Now we can argue about the meaning of the word truth for weeks, but I’d rather not.  I think – despite all of the weakness of memory (and for that matter, observation) – that sophisticated readers understand that the truth they are given in memoir is the author’s subjective truth.  There is no hope of objective accuracy, nor would that be as interesting to read.  But you go after your truth, with honest intent.  That means that an author who is willingly, consciously subverting what he remembers is not writing memoir, by my definition. Cross that line, and you are writing fiction.  Which is fine, but it is another project entirely.

So I’ve pulled these six memoirs down from my shelves to illustrate how a life can be presented artfully. Starting with:

This Boy’s Life, Tobias Wolff (1989): Wolff’s memoir is the first that I remember reading.  I had read autobiography, of course, and long-form journalism, but Wolff’s brutally-honest, cinematic childhood memoir was the first to give me what previously I had only found in novels: the ability to escape into someone else’s life and another world, another time. Wolff wasn’t the first to write memoir in this way, but This Boy’s Life remains a touchstone to me and many other writers.  I love the opening note to the reader: “I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology.  Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome.  I’ve allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell.”

Read the whole post here.

That’s the most frequently asked question when someone hears about this blog. Having now read at least 100 memoirs, I am ready to offer my own top ten list for your inspection. The ten books fall into three categories:

Memoirs written before the current trend–books that first drew me to the genre:

1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.
2. One Writer’s Beginnings by Eudora Welty
3. Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Girls who Dream Big and Get Out of Dodge

1. The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
2. An American Childhood by Annie Dillard
3. A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel
4. Little Heathens by Mildred Armstrong Kalish

Spiritual Awakenings

1. Dakota by Kathleen Norris
2. Learning to Die in Miami by Carlos Eires
3. Lit by Mary Karr

What do I look for in memoir? A voice that sings even through desperate times, a transcendent voice, a voice at once unique and yet connected to a community and a place, especially rural landscapes.

What can you add or subtract from this description for your own personal hermeneutic?

Easy to say. Hard to do.

In another post on voice, I described how helpful it was for me to try to visualize my voice as a farm. Today I am pondering the role of another of the senses–touch. How does one sense inform, enlarge, or restrict, another one?

Here’s a thesis to consider: a writer whose voice touches us usually has been touched profoundly by others. Have they been touched gently, intimately, wisely? Or has the touch been rough, unknowing, uncaring? What places inside us do they reach, and how do they touch us?

I first learned about voice and touch from Max DePree. Max likes to joke that he is a “born leader” because his father owned the company he later led. He eventually became CEO of the progressive, high-quality furniture company Herman Miller Inc., makers of the ubiquitous Aeron Chairs and famous for hiring the team of Charles and Ray Eames, who designed the quintessential modern chair included in the MoMA collection, the Eames Chair. When Max agreed to be my mentor, back in 1998, two years after I became president of Goshen College, I was deeply moved. I love to hear his voice, and his presence in my life has influenced me in ways neither of us can fully comprehend.

Max and me, 2008

Max has written a lot of books about leadership, most famously, Leadership is an Art (1989, 2004) and Leadership Jazz (1992,2008)

But the story that touched me most from Max comes from his experience as a grandfather rather than as a CEO. It comes from a now out-of-print book called Dear Zoe, one of the most beautiful childbirth and childhood stories ever written. Max wrote this book as a series of letters to his granddaughter Zoe, who was born prematurely (24 weeks inside the womb) and weighed 1 pound 7 ounces and was eleven inches tall. Max could slip his wedding ring up Zoe’s arm all the way to the top. When he dies, he wants to give Zoe his ring on a gold chain.

Here is the passage from that book that catches me in the throat every time I read it. It describes Grandpa Max’s encounter with a nurse after Zoe had, to the amazement of all, survived her first few days. Listen, please, to Max in his own voice:

“While we were looking at you, a wonderful nurse named Ruth came over to chat. After a few minutes she turned to me and said, ‘For the next several month, at least, you’re the surrogate father. I want you to come to the hospital every day to visit Zoe, and when you come I would like you to rub her body and her legs and arms with the tip of your finger. While you’re caressing her, you should tell her over and over how much you love her, because she has to be able to connect your voice to your touch.’

I’m sure Ruth’s suggestion is going to be very important in our relationship together. I also have the feeling that she has given me something enormously profound to ponder.”

As I write these words, a little boy is getting ready to be born in New York City. I don’t know his name yet, but I do know that I want to touch him and that I will love his voice. He will make me a grandmother for the first time, and I hope that he will always connect my voice to my touch. His doctor says he could come any day now, and we wait prayerfully for him and his mother as they prepare for the amazing journey toward birth.

Have you learned anything about the connection of voice and touch from your children or grandchildren, if you have them?

What touches you in another person’s voice? You can describe either physical or metaphorical reality. As you read or write, are you aware of times when your voice and your touch connect? What happens?

Shirley H. Showalter and Mary Karr at Calvin College Festival of Faith and Writing

Mary Karr has done it again. Maybe I should say that Amanda Fortini has done it–meaning that the interview Fortini published in The Paris Review with Karr as a subject is wonderful. If you haven’t read any of Karr’s poetry or her three memoirs, you will want to do so after reading the interview. If you have read lots of Karr, you will find the interview doubly gratifying. It will fill in some cracks for you in her published memories.

Karr comes across as both totally honest in her colorfully Texan way and also as a bit reticent. Her new-found faith in God has transformed the way she writes. She prays before she writes each day. Ironically, this submission to God’s will in writing also strengthens her joy as she reports on her latest triumphs in the literary world. She would sound like a braggart online if she were only speaking from the ego. Instead, she is cheerleading for the “team”–God the Author, herself as author, and her readers as community.

On Facebook (you can sign up to be a fan here) she loves to share her triumphs with her fans. On Twitter (you can follow here) her inimitable voice comes through as well (check out her August tweets).

One of the most frequently visited posts among the 215 archived here is the Top Ten List (it’s really eleven) from another interview Mary gave on NPR. My review of her latest memoir Lit is here. If you aspire to greatness in memoir, you will want to read all these books plus Mary’s own. I’m still working on the list myself.

What do you find most attractive about Mary, the Paris Review interview, the Facebook and Twitter pages, or the Top Ten List? Fans and critics are both welcome here!

Jane Friedman "It takes guts to be gentle and kind." (The Smiths)

Jane Friedman has 22,679 Twitter followers, some of whom could more appropriately be called devotees. It’s worth getting a Twitter account just to follow her. You’ll soon see why she has built a rabid tribe. She’s smart, ahead of the rapidly evolving book industry curve, witty–and generous.

One of the things I like most about social media is that it teaches the golden rule better than any priest or parent. Jane herself gives away many of her best ideas, and she offers her readers the present of her presence. She answers questions and encourages others online. When she mentioned me once in a Tweet, I was elated.

One example of Jane’s generosity is her “best tweets for writers” feature which shows up each Sunday on her blog. She explains, “I watch Twitter, so you don’t have to.”

Last week in her roundup of the best tweets, she included a post by literary agent Jessica Papin on writing memoir which you can see here. Papin finds Ira Glass’s explanation about story structure pertinent to memoir writers. Since I am one of those people who will sit in my car for a full 15 minutes after my trip has ended so as not to miss a minute of a This American Life story on NPR, I’ll write more about his take on story in a future post.

Naturally, after reading Jane Friedman’s Best Tweets for Writers post, finding a useful memoir post included (above), and seeing how many RT’s the post got on Twitter, I wondered if my own audience would benefit from timely, focused, content aggregation on memoir only.

One of Jane’s other suggested Tweets takes you to this good post which explains how to aggregate. It’s a little above my experience level, but I might tackle it if the interest were high.

Let me know if you want this service. I probably would do it monthly–but only if you encourage me in the comment section.  In the meantime, here’s one for those of you who have a manuscript of a memoir and want to find an agent. Enjoy agent Rachelle Gardner’s humor about ten things that annoy an agent, and take the implicit advice!

Also, here’s a good place for me to shout out to three other memoir blog sites. I used to have a blogroll on my home page, before my site was hacked and my son kindly migrated all my content to WordPress. Until I find a permanent place on my home page for these links, let me recommend Women’s Memoirs, National Association of Memoir Writers, and Memory Writers Network, and Narrative. They are all terrific!!

Today’s question: are there enough good memoir blog posts to do a regular online roundup of them, and how important would such a service be to you? By what criteria would one select the “best”?

Johnny Cash and Ruth Carter Cash were some of the best. When I heard about Johnny Cash’s daughter Rosanne Cash’s album The List, I blogged about it here. Last night I heard Diane Rehm interview Rosanne, and the broadcast brought tears to my eyes. If you can watch theYouTube below of father and daughter without having your vision fog up a little, you are made of sterner stuff than I am.
I now have to read Rosanne Cash’s new memoir with the perfect name for her life: Composed.

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