Quotes About Memoir

Sam writes in her funny, fascinating memoir, Not By Accident.

The last book I read to my mom was 'Barbara Bush: A Memoir' published by mom in 1994. It reflected on their entire life - dad going to China, running the CIA, running for Senate, running for President twice.

For so many years, my husband has lauded the emotional solidity of midwesterners: stoic, humble, without affectation! But these aren't the kinds of people who provide good memoir material. Imagine the jacket copy: People behaved mostly well and then they died.

For so many years, my husband has lauded the emotional solidity of midwesterners: stoic, humble, without affectation! But these aren't the kinds of people who provide good memoir material.

I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.

I've been making notes of my life, but when it finally came time to write it, it took me back, and I cried many tears. But I also think that it's liberating.

Asking me how to write a memoir is a little like saying, "I really want to have sex, where do I start?" What one person fantasizes about would ruin the romance for another.

No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self—your neat analyses and tidy excuses.

You can do "research," i.e. postponing writing, till Jesus dons a nightie. But your memoir's real enemy is blinking back at you from the shaving glass when you floss at night—your ignorant ego and its myriad masks.

However many intellectual pleasures a book may offer up, it's usually your emotional connection to the memoir's narrator that hooks you in. And how does she do that? A good writer can conjure a landscape and its peoples to live inside you, and the best writers make you feel they've disclosed their soft underbellies. Seeing someone naked thrills us a little.

But unless you're looking at actual lived experience, the more profound meanings will remain forever shrouded. You'll never unearth the more complex truths, the ones that counter that convenient first take on the past. A memoirist forging false tales to support his more comfortable notions—or to pump himself up for the audience—never learns who he is. He's missing the personal liberation that comes from the examined life.

personal experience has the possibility to transform both the tellers of it and the listeners to it. Just as the novel form once took up experiences of urban industrialized society that weren't being addressed in sermons or epistles or epic poems, so memoir—with its single, intensely personal voice—wrestles with family issues in a way readers of late find compelling.

In terms of cathartic affect, memoir is like therapy, the difference being that in therapy, you pay them. The therapist is the mommy, and you're the baby. In memoir, you're the mommy, and the reader's the baby. And—hopefully—they pay you. ("No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money," Samuel Johnson said.)

In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer's struggle for self often serves as the book's organizing principle, and the narrator's battle to become whole rages over the book's trajectory.

No matter how self-aware you are, memoir wrenches at your insides precisely because it makes you battle with your very self – your neat analyses and tidy excuses… Your small pieties and impenetrable, mostly unconscious poses invariably trip you up. p. xxi

Borman much later admitted that he was, as Cernan wrote in his memoir, "sick as a dog* all the way to the moon.

Mir astronaut Jerry Linenger writes in his memoir that he was surprised to find a bottle of cognac in one arm of his spacesuit and a bottle of whiskey in the other. (Linenger was the Frank Burns of space exploration:

Still, I strongly resisted the idea of offering up my past in a book, a past that left me feeling exposed, even slightly ashamed.

I'm working on a second cookbook and am working on my love story, 'Black Heels to Tractor Wheels.

I did a book event with a former colleague, Bob Bauer, and was so relieved that he said I got all the CIA stuff right.

I think I have had a remarkable and colorful life, so I decided to share it.

'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.

My parents left Libya in 1979, escaping political repression, and settled in Cairo. I was nine.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis' by JD Vance made me entirely rethink U.S. republicanism, Donald Trump and the American white working class.