Unless you confess your own emotional stakes in a project, why should a reader have any?

A friend called to say she was going crazy once, and I said, “Who’s noticing that?” You want to get next to that quiet, noticer self as a starting place.

Any time you try to collapse the distance between your delusions about the past and what really happened, there’s suffering involved.

Don’t use jargon to describe people. It’s both disrespectful and bad writing. I never called my parents alcoholics; I showed myself pouring vodka down the sink. Give information in the form you received it.

Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You’ll need both sides of yourself—the beautiful and the beastly—to hold a reader’s attention.

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.

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

The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story.

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