Candid revelations for readers; useful advice and encouragement for aspiring writers.
Memoirists reflect on why and how to write “a true-life tale.”
The enormous current popularity of memoirs inspired Maran (A Theory of Small Earthquakes, 2012, etc.) to ask 20 writers to share thoughts on motivation, morality, and craft. Although the editor writes that this book is aimed at readers as well as writers, the structure suggests that would-be memoirists are the intended audience. Maran prefaces each chapter with a sprightly introduction, along with “Vitals” such as birthdate, schooling, Twitter and website addresses, and bibliography. Each entry is divided into brief sections, beginning with “Why I write about myself” and ending with a boxed nugget of advice called “Wisdom for Memoir Writers.” Most of the contributors are likely to be familiar to readers: Edwidge Danticat, A.M. Homes, Sue Monk Kidd, Anne Lamott, Cheryl Strayed, and Ayelet Waldman are among the women; Pat Conroy, Nick Flynn, and James McBride are among the men. Some offer opinions about the value of memoir as catharsis, therapy, or revenge. All agree that crafting a memoir is different from keeping a diary. “You still have to write scenes and be engaging,” Danticat advises, “You have to edit mercilessly….Don’t just put things in because ‘they happened.’ ” Waldman echoes Danticat’s advice: “Writing memoir requires the construction of story and character in the same way that writing anything does. The trick with memoir is that the story and the character have to be true.” However, there’s considerable disagreement about memoirists’ responsibility to other people. “Memoirs hurt people,” Conroy writes. “Secrets hurt people. The question to ask yourself is, if you tell your story, will it do enough good to make it worth hurting people?” Strayed cautions, “You have to think about the personal consequences of writing about others on a case-by-case basis.” David Sheff declares simply, “Don’t hurt people.” Other contributors include Kate Christensen, Edmund White, and Jesmyn Ward.
Candid revelations for readers; useful advice and encouragement for aspiring writers.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-14-218197-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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