Writing Firebird and sojourning in the land of memory helped Mark Doty to see that “the past is not static, or ever truly complete; as we age we see from new positions, shifting angles.” Memoirist Sue William Silverman agrees, writing, “Memory is not the history of what happened; memory is the history of our story of what happened.” The stories we

The archetype of change lies at the core of the majority of memoirs—remember my argument in Chapter I that the main archetype in memoir is transition, or change. Readers are constantly facing changes in their lives, and they often come to the human instruction manual of memoir to see how memoirists struggle with their own changes, both external and

You can also just type into a search engine “words associated with x” or visit a website like relatedwords.org. Another good resource is reversedictionary.org, where you can type in a definition and it will give you words. I typed in “I was so angry” and one phrase it gave me was “hopping mad,” which is sure to light up the brain more than “I was

This word “truth” is one I never employ. I never think about it and I never use it. My idea of what a memoirist owes a reader is honesty, however that is constructed. The reader must feel that the narrator, the memoirist, is trying to get to the bottom of the experience that one is writing about, whatever that experience is. The truth seeker—that's

Sharing writing, any writing, can be vulnerable. Even if your story is not a difficult one to tell, writing is always difficult (of course, only writers know this—everyone else thinks it’s easy, which is why the author Thomas Mann said, “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people”). I

Applying this sense to writing, the editor and critic Leon Wieseltier asserted that “the range of a writer’s metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition,” which brings us back to Aristotle’s idea that the genius writer is the writer of metaphor. Metaphors are not only artsy, but they’re brainy. If intuition is our sixth sense, our sixth way

But I expect something different from memoir. I expect a reflective author. I expect some form of “this is who I’ve become as a result of having these experiences” or “this is what I now know about life as a result of going through this experience.” When I read memoir, I invest in a person, not just a plot, and in my favorite memoirs, the author is

But this stage is not limited to literal death. We can memorialize a broken relationship, a city changed by a natural disaster, a bygone era, the loss of our innocence, a life cleaved in two by a before and an after.

through struggle. I think this simplified journey structure has much to offer memoir writers who are writing about major transformations in life. We can ask ourselves, what died in me? How did it die? What was the cause of death? Who assisted in the murder of this part of me? Who stood by and watched it happen? How long did it take to die? The