Quotes About Memoir

and since I was bound to screw them up, my only hope was to screw them up in a sufficiently dramatic way, a way that led to a best-selling memoir, so they could make big bucks in the psychological freak show circuit.

My memoir is being published by Beaufort Books and will be available fall of 2015. It's about my unusual life as a child actor and how I made the unpopular choice to leave Hollywood, grow up, and stop pretending.

In many ways, everything about my upbringing decreed that I wouldn't write a memoir because in the world where I grew up, in Chicago in the Fifties and Sixties, one key way of protesting ourselves - 'we' meaning black people - against racism, against its stereotypes and its insults, was to curate and narrate very carefully the story of the people.

If people call my book an actor's memoir I will be very upset. I can't bear anything too literal, so it has elements of truth and elements of fiction sitting side by side.

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is.

Just Kids, de Patti Smith:

It's called 'Odd Boy Out' because as I was writing it I realized I was a bit of an oddity as a child.

You get a bad review with a novel, and it hurts. But I imagine if you get a bad review with a memoir, it hurts more because you can always say, 'Well, they didn't like my characters,' but when you're the character, it's like, 'Oh, yeah, they actually didn't like me.'

Well I'm not a novelist. I've only written one book and that is a memoir.

I've been asked to write an autobiography, and I've started it a couple of times, on different angles, and maybe one day I will, but you know what? There's time for that because I'd like to have the whole story.

Any responsible essayist or memoir writer who's writing about herself is not just saying, 'Here's what happened,' and opening up her diary. There needs to be consideration of other people's feelings.

I tell my students, who are concerned with the question of betrayal, that when it comes to memoir, there is no such thing as absolute truth—only the truth that is singularly their own. I say this not to release them from responsibility but to illuminate the subjectivity of our inner lives. One person's experience is not another's.

While in Aspen, I was on a panel one evening with Andre Dubus III, who spoke of what happens when a memoir devolves into self-pity: "Wah, wah, wah. Should we call the wambulance?

This is a work of nonfiction.

All family histories, personal histories,are as sketchy and unreliable as histories of the Phoenicians, it seems to me. We should note everything down, fill in the wide gaps if we can. Which is why I am writing this my darlings.

Everything I know about being a fashion model in the 21st Century I learned from Jenna Sauers' wonderful Jezebel memoir, "I Am The Anonymous Model." Meredith's modeling career is based on it. Available with a quick Google.

A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true.

I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.

Trachtenberg once said to me," recalled Dodd in her memoir, "that when communism came to America it would come under the label of 'progressive democracy.' 'It will come,' he added, 'in labels acceptable to the American people.

I turned seventy in the Kalahari Desert and defended myself against oafs in the stink and misery of northern Angola. All these trips, ten of them, became books.

life and death; A Gift of Hope, a memoir

A biography is like a mini-series with different twists and turns, ups and downs. Others will rewrite it for you when you forget to sign on the last page.

Writers of memoir are storytellers, and the point of a personal story is to make a truth that resonates for you, that closes the experience around a narrative and brings it to completion.

A memoir is my version of events. My perspective. I choose what to tell and what to omit. I choose the adjectives to describe a situation, and in that sense, I'm creating a form of fiction.