Quotes About Memoirist

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.

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.

As a memoirist, I may claim to write the easier-to-remember things, but I could also just be writing to sweep them away. 'Don't bother me about my past,' I'll say, 'It's out in paperback now.'

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.

The memoirist's job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.

Forget how inventing stuff breaks a contract with the reader, it fences the memoirist off from the deeper truths that only surface in draft five or ten or twenty.

As a memoirist, it's your job to impose order and meaning on the chaos of life.

If the memoirist is borrowing narrative techniques from fiction, shouldn't the novelist borrow a few tricks from successful non-fiction?

How to preside over your own internal disorder? Finding the I that can represent the pack of you is the first challenge of the memoirist.

The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it's physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.

The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in a void. The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it's the wisdom—or rather the movement towards it—that counts.

Your memory rope may not contain a precise, photographic accounting of past events, because those moments become lost within seconds of anything that occurs. But still, your honest (if not accurate) memories will be attached to those knots, and those honest memories—along with reflection, examination, reconsideration—are precisely what the memoirist has to offer.

The tumults of time are oft passed by in records of the private memoirist; for our days consist not of the Senatorial speech and the refracted solar beam cast through heroic cloud, but rather of bread eaten, and ink blotted, and talk of the sermon, and walks along the whiskery avenues in the garden.

Everywhere I go as a writer—especially if I'm in drag as a "memoirist"—such fears seem to be first and foremost on people's minds. People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.)