100 Memoirs

 “What makes us laugh out loud?” is the question I am asking as I re-read Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. Next week I will try to answer that question for a guest post  I plan to send to Matilda Butler at the great website  Womensmemoirs.com. If you have not discovered this website, I recommend that you [...]

Have you tried to tell your life story in just six words?  Smith magazine discovered a gold mine with this concept a few years ago and now has published several popular books listing these short narratives.
The whole concept derives from a single story. Supposedly Ernest Hemingway was challenged to tell a story in six words and chose [...]

Ben Yagoda’s history of the memoir genre should make any other survey redundant. He’s performed a great service, not only to readers and writers but also to the new field of nonfiction/memoir studies.
As promised previously, I will describe not only what I learned from reading the book but also from reading it on the Kindle. First, the [...]

A few weeks ago I posted a list of 18 books I had blogged about in the last six months. At the end of the list I included two books I have not yet read, pictured here.
Today I got out my six-month-old Kindle and spent 20 seconds ordering the two books–Mary Karr’s Lit and Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A [...]

Books about memoir tend to be serious. Writers theorize about the role of memory, wonder about its reliability, and offer suggestions about how to write artfully.
This one is different. Nancy K. Miller has written a witty and thoughtful book about memoir. She writes about her own life while splicing in bits of contrast and [...]

Becoming Whole:  Writing Your Healing Story by Linda Joy Myers belongs in your library of books about memoir.  Like Tristine Rainer’s Your Life as Story, Maureen Murdock’s Unreliable Truth: Memory and Memoir, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, and Patty Miller’s The Memoir Book, all of which have been mentioned or reviewed here, this book [...]

I remember reading this breakthrough book soon after it was published in the late 1980’s.  I don’t remember how I bought the book, and I don’t have the old copy on my shelf, so I may have loaned or given it away, Mostly, I remember how I felt after reading it. High!  I had never [...]

One of the wise women I am honored to have in my life, Angeles Arrien, recommended this book to me. I found the book thoughtful and provocative, a wonderful distillation of many years of reflection both on the author’s personal story but also on the process of living, reflecting, writing, and transforming. Reading [...]