Quotes About Memoir

Paul Lisicky, in his new memoir, 'The Narrow Door,' describes losing his old friend, the novelist Denise Gess, and his husband, the acclaimed poet and memoirist Mark Doty, within a year of each other: Gess to cancer, at the age of 57, and Doty to another man.

Memoir is a difficult literary form to pull off when dealing with discrete and poignant moments in a life, even harder when seeking to narrate over 80 years of existence.

If I write that it was a cold day, you can be sure I know it was a cold day because Pepys told us.

Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that's what - that whole oversharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder. And I'm not saying that every, you know, I'm not accusing every memoirist of being bipolar. But I think in a way it's kind of a gift.

Shi Zhe wrote in his memoir, "and if you didn't confess you were tortured and stayed in prison. The more stories you made up the better you were treated.

Frank Harris' My Life and Loves.

You read so much about the healing power of memoir, but you don't read about the wounding power it has first. The recollection of past events is not, in and of itself, therapeutic.

I'll note you in my book of memory.

Sarashina Nikki

I often wonder if you wrote your memoir today, if you held wonder in one hand and courage in another and truly believed that anything was possible.

A deeply true, wholly aching account of the dangerous way we live now--LOVE JUNKIE is great fun to read, and finally fully redemptive. Rachel Resnick brings a light, delightful touch to a hard subject, and creates a great, relatable, readable memoir.

But mostly, it's a book about my relationship with my father.

'Out of Africa,' Dinesen's second book, is a love story, though not the one portrayed by Streep and Redford in the film. The memoir is about Dinesen's love of East Africa - the cultures, the landscapes, the animals. The feeling that saturates the book is reverence.

In a memoir, I think, the contract implies a certain degree of truth. I think you have to be as true to your memory and your experience as you possibly can.

People would tell me, especially after my marriage to Prince, 'You need to write a book because you've had a crazy life.'

Not to be too 'Tale of Two Cities' about it, but I find writing a memoir easier than writing fiction, and more difficult.

An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.

Fiorito has all the right stuff. His splendid memoir about his relationship with his dying father belongs on that small shelf with Philip Roth's Patrimony and Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

Limerick gained a reputation for piety, but we knew it was only the rain.

If this were a chapter in your memoir, wouldn't future you want you to go?

Why read the memoir? Sven Birkerts offers a succinct reason. 'The point—the glory—of memoir is that it anchors its authority in the actual life; it is a modeling of the process of creative self-inquiry as it is applied to the stuff of lived experience. This really happened is the baseline contention of the memoir.

a memoir is meant to be an impression of life, and not a photograph.

One of the things I learned about writing a memoir is you can't drag the reader through everything. Every human life is worth 20 memoirs.

It's weird being an author because it's different than writing songs. You put so much more of yourself out there to be judged because it's a memoir. So when the reviews come in, they all feel really personal. Some people are just going to hate you no matter what. Personally, I never believe good reviews.