Quotes from Judith Barrington

If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.

Nancy Mairs, in Remembering the Bone House

For women, deeply personal writing can also be described as a rebellion against the expected role, though in the case of women, the expectation is that we will be preoccupied with inner lives, with relationships, and with family, but that we will gear our stories to satisfy, flatter, or collude with our immediate circle.

Any well-written memoir is worth perusing with an eye to its structure.

The great essayist Montaigne understood that "in an essay, the track of a person's thoughts struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot, is the adventure." Rather than simply telling a story from her life, the memoirist both tells the story and muses upon it, trying to unravel what it means in the light of her current knowledge.

yet voice is something like the fingerprint of the writer—not the persona on the page but the writer with her own particular linguistic quirks, sentence rhythms, and recurring images. The memoirist needs to have this fingerprint too, even if she only speaks as herself.

Moving both backward and forward in time, re-creating believable dialogue, switching back and forth between scene and summary, and controlling the pace and tension of the story, the memoirist keeps her reader engaged by being an adept storyteller. So, memoir is really a kind of hybrid form with elements of both fiction and essay, in which the author's voice, musing conversationally on a true story, is all important.

Vivian Gornick's memoir Fierce Attachments

Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest.

you must remain limited by your experience, unless you turn to fiction, in which you can, of course, embrace people, places, and events you have never personally known.

While imagination certainly plays a role in both kinds of writing, the application of it in memoir is circumscribed by the facts, while in fiction it is circumscribed by what the reader will believe.

Dishonest writing is very often mediocre writing.

The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers.

Self-revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer.

One of your first tasks, then, is to ask yourself: why do I care about this? The answer will make you feel entitled to tell your own story—to accept that it is not only worthy of being written down but fit material for literature—something you want to revise and craft until it is beautiful.

a story can stay buried in my memory for years and years, but the minute it surfaces into consciousness as a story idea, it is likely to get lost. If I don't grab it as it begins to form itself as a narrative, it can become permanently erased, and even if I remember the general subject matter, the voice that started narrating in my mind eludes me.

not an experience shared by most potential readers—I realized that, if I did it well, some of those readers could have that same experience of identification that I valued so much. Moments in my life might resonate with moments in theirs. They might even step right outside their familiar histories and share mine for a while.

One thing we can probably agree on is that the truth, however we define it, is often hard to tell. It can be hard to tell the facts of the story, and it can be hard to tell its emotional truth too.