Memoir Quotes - Page 16

• If anything, I've found nonfiction a little easier. You don't have to make anything up. Of course, that's the inherent difficulty as well: when you hit an information black hole, you don't get to make it up. That hasn't come up too often with this project though. I'm lucky to have tons of primary source material , reams of letters and diaries and memoirs.

  Debra Dean

  Black, Lucky, Diaries

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Oftentimes, if a writer really gets her hooks into me, I'll want to read interviews, or listen to an interview, or read a literary biography or a memoir of some kind. And doing so almost always deepens my enjoyment of the author and her work.

  Brad Listi

  Want, Biographies, Interviews

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Through the process of specifically writing this memoir, there was so much reckoning that I had to do. It was very difficult. It doesn't erase anything that happened, but I think that it was healthy for me to do it. The teenage self-loathing that I suffered from all of a sudden found itself turned into rapids with my grief after my brother died. I turned it inwards. In the same way that my mom processes her grief and her problems. This project, as a memoir, has helped me funnel it outwards.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Mom, Brother, Teenage

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When I decided to write about my brother and friends, I was attempting to answer the question why. Why did they all die like that? Why so many of them? Why so close together? Why were they all so young? Why, especially, in the kinds of places where we are from? Why would they all die back to back to back to back? I feel like I was writing my way towards an answer in the memoir.

  Jesmyn Ward

  Brother, Writing, Together

  Source: therumpus.net

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• In my memoir, I admit that I've been as fearful of success as of failure. In fact, when 'Passages' was published, I so dreaded bad reviews that I ran away to Italy with a girlfriend and our children to hide out.

  Gail Sheehy

  Girlfriend, Children, Facts

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• I was wowed by Margo Jefferson's memoir, Negroland, which is about growing up black and privileged in Chicago in the fifties and sixties. It was a window into an alien world. Obviously, I'm not black, but what was really alien to me was her family's focus on respectability. I was never taught when to wear white gloves, what length skirt is appropriate.

  Justine Larbalestier

  Growing Up, White, Focus

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• My first memoir, 'Home,' was about my childhood, early training and formative years in the Theater, i am so pleased that my good friends at the Hachette Book Group have encouraged me to share the next phase of my life, beginning with my arrival in Hollywood and the wonderful movies and television programs I was asked to be a part of.

  Julie Andrews

  Life, Book, Home

  "Julie Andrews Announces New Memoir". www.cbsnews.com. March 23, 2015.

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• Autobiographical writings, essays, interviews, various other things... All the non-fiction prose I wanted to keep, that was the idea behind this collected volume, which came out about few years ago. I didn't think of Winter Journal, for example, as an autobiography, or a memoir. What it is is a literary work, composed of autobiographical fragments, but trying to attain, I hope, the effect of music.

  Paul Auster

  Writing, Winter, Thinking

  Interview with Nathalie Cochoy, Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• [Mark] Twain was a publisher. He published General Grant's Memoirs (a big success) and had a hand in the publishing of many of his own books. He would, I think, be very keen about the question of how a book would sell.

  Hal Holbrook

  Book, Thinking, Hands

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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• On resigning as collaborator on the memoirs of the former Wallis Warfield Simpson, new summaries, 6 October 1955. You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

  Cleveland Amory

  October, Rebecca, Duchess

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• There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.

  Paul Auster

  Dog, Writing, Boys

  "An Interview with Paul Auster". Interview with Nathalie Cochoy and Sophie Vallas, transatlantica.revues.org. March 2014.

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• As a publisher and author, I'm a big fan of historical fiction and also memoir.

  Andrea Davis Pinkney

  Historical, Fans, Fiction

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• What I wanted was to write a memoir that was immersive rather than reflective, to resurrect a long-gone version of my own consciousness. I kept expecting that sooner or later the effort would come to seem like second nature to me, but it never did.

  Kevin Brockmeier

  Writing, Long, Effort

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The minute I landed back in Alaska, it was back to hip boots and fish guts. This cultural flipping wasn't easy - especially on top of the post-divorce fighting that was still going on between my parents. But this is why you don't write a memoir at age fourteen.

  Leigh Newman

  Writing, Divorce, Fighting

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.

  Aleksandar Hemon

  Educational, Needs, Purpose

  "There Is No Real Life". Interview with Brad Fox, www.guernicamag.com. March 15, 2013.

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• But listening to him [Barack Obama] speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state Senate.

  Sarah Palin

  Men, Law, Two

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• In my opinion, the continued popularity of these gross distortions of Iran in the U.S. seems to reveal more about certain aspects of America than about Iran. It seems that the popularity of these memoirs is largely due to the fact that, while claiming to do the opposite, they regularly reinforce the dominant representations of Iran in America by constructing an exotic, backward, and barbaric Iran principally based on U.S. archives.

  Mohammad Marandi

  Iran, Opposites, America

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• The story of the memoir is a story of me creating certain narratives so that I could live with my own experience and with the uneasy relationship between what I was doing and what I believed in - or what I saw as an uneasy relationship between those two things.

  Melissa Febos

  Two, Creating, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I disagree that Blood Will Out is a memoir in the conventional sense. It's the story of a relationship, primarily, not an individual. The "me" in the book is a specialized version of me, the person who Clark manipulated and fooled. I could cover the same years of my life from an entirely different perspective in another book, by concentrating on my experience as a husband, say. But I was selective. I focused on my duping.

  Walter Kirn

  Husband, Book, Blood

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.

  Meghan Daum

  Book, Done, Firsts

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I guess that my opinion of writing about real people is informed by defenses of Joyce Maynard's memoir, that the experiences were a part of my life as well, and that I have the right to write about my life.

  Marie Calloway

  Real, Writing, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

  Kate Zambreno

  Criticism, Nonfiction, Mainstream

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

  William Zinsser

  Art, Inventing

  "On Writing Well". Book by William Zinsser (Chapter 12: Writing About Yourself: The Memoir, p. 99), 1976.

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• The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

  Kate Zambreno

  Female, Literature, Form

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.

  Kate Zambreno

  Thinking, Canon

  Source: therumpus.net

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