The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

The question clearly being asked in an exemplary memoir is “Who am I?” Who exactly is this “I” upon whom turns the significance of this story-taken-directly-from-life? On that question the writer of memoir must deliver. Not with an answer but with depth of inquiry.

Who is speaking, what is being said, and what is the relation between the two?

“Good writing has two characteristics,” a gifted teacher of writing once said. “It’s alive on the page and the reader is persuaded that the writer is on a voyage of discovery.”

The personal had become political, and the headlines metaphoric.

I began to read the greats in essay writing—and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae.

A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working

Modern memoir posits that the shaped presentation of one’s own life is of value to the disinterested reader only if it dramatizes and reflects sufficiently on the experience of “becoming”: undertakes to trace the internal movement away from the murk of being told who you are by the accident of circumstance toward the clarity that identifies accurat

The writing we call personal narrative is written by people who, in essence, are imagining only themselves: in relation to the subject in hand. The connection is an intimate one; in fact, it is critical.

In nonfiction, the writer has only the singular self to work with. So it is the other in oneself that the writer must seek and find to create movement, achieve a dynamic. Inevitably, the piece builds only when the narrator is involved not in confession but in this kind of self-investigation, the kind that means to provide motion, purpose, and drama