Top Highlights

• In memoir, one event follows another. Birth leads to puberty leads to sex. The books are held together by happenstance, theme, and (most powerfully) the sheer, convincing poetry of a single person trying to make sense of the past.
• 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.
• Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve met. Truth is not their enemy. It’s the bannister they grab for when feeling around on the dark cellar stairs. It’s the solution.
• I show you stuff I’ve read that I can’t live without—Black Boy (aka American Hunger), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Dispatches, The Woman Warrior, Stop-Time, The Kiss, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, The Color of Water, Good-Bye to All That, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Book...
• In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.