The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective authority but with subjective curiosity.

I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.

Also, we naturally tend to superimpose our present selves onto who we were before, and that can prevent us from recalling stuff that doesn’t shore up our current identities.

For the more haunted among us, only looking back at the past can permit it finally to become past.

single-note tales seldom bear rereading.

What do people usually like and dislike about you? You should reflect both aspects in your pages. 2. How do you want to be perceived, and in what ways have you ever been false or posed as other than who you are? (Lovers/family yelling at you when they’re mad have answered this one for you, btw.) 3. Is there any verbal signpost you can look for that

However random or episodic a book seems, a blazing psychic struggle holds it together, either thematically or in the way a plot would keep a novel rolling forward.

“Anything worth doing is worth over-doing.” (The unspoken battle cry of many an alcoholic such as myself.)

A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or to pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He’s missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life.