100 Memoirs

Edward Short’s review of Mary Karr’s Lit (which I also reviewed here), contains a few paragraphs very relevant to all memoir writers. I invite you to read the complete review here. Short’s insights are brilliant.
Here are the four most relevant paragraphs to our concerns as we seek to understand the power of memoir to go beyond [...]

As you know, the goal of this blog is self-education in public.  I am trying to learn about memoir by reading and reviewing great examples of the genre, books about the genre, and offering some mini-memoir on the way. When readers search for good memoir reading lists, I want them to find this blog. What [...]

The key to writing a great memoir is seducing the reader to fall in love with you. After reading first The Liars’ Club and now Lit, I am totally smitten. I have Karr’s second memoir Cherry on my shelf and will need to read it also.
Lit is the story of a girl from Texas whose [...]

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 [...]

If you are an author or hoping to become one, you are entering a field in great flux. Maybe chaotic is not too strong a word to describe the world of publishing right now. In such a time, a good guide makes all the difference.  Seth Godin, who has written ten bestsellers, using totally new [...]

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an op-ed from Mary Karr about the way opponents of Barack Obama like to diminish him by calling him a memoirist, just as they make fun of his career as a community organizer.
Karr, who has written several excellent memoirs herself, including
and
describes why memoir writing is a good [...]