MEMOIR
MEMOIR
"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. The contemporary memoir includes retrospection as an essential part of the story. Your reader has to be willing to be both entertained by the story itself and interested in how you now, looking back on it, understand it."
-- Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir
Memoir is a single-strand of one's life, written for an audience. One may concentrate on a particular time or place in their life ("MyYears in the White House") or on a specific activity ("My Life as a Jock"). Although a memoir is based on truth, it incorporates elements of fiction. Often characters are conflated, names changed, and events rearranged in order to make the work more comprehensible & readable. "Lie in order to be more true," as Henry Miller puts it. Memoirs often grow out of journal material which needs to be shaped and crafted, with boring or irrelevant details left out.
In my memoir "In Buddha's Kitchen," I concentrated on my experiences as a chef, centering on the years spent cooking in a Tibetan retreat center. In addition to talking about life as a chef, I used food or cooking-related metaphors to describe the inner process of transormation as in the subtitle, "Cooking and Being Cooked." I also tried to select images from the kitchen when being descriptive, changing a sentence such as "She was as boring as dirt." to "She was as boring as yesterday's bowl of oatmeal." This sort of concentration of theme has a subtle effect on voice, enhancing the sense that a chef is telling the story.
ADVICE FOR MEMOIRISTS (from INVENTING THE TRUTH: the Art & Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser):
"...not biography but an art form....you might as well make it into a story."
-- Russell Baker"just start telling the story."
-- Henry Lewis Gates, Jr."be true to the older and wiser person you have become."
-- Eileen Simpson"make it entertaining...drop the mask."
-- Frank McCourt
"use fiction to report what was real."
"Write with love, starting with self-love."
"The past is best confronted."
-- William Zinsser
from UNRELIABLE TRUTH: On Memoirs and Memory, by Maureen Murdock:"This is a memoir, not a history book, but in an effort to make it accurate, I've tried to check my memory againstthe facts. It is distressing for me to note how infrequently the facts concur with my memory of what happened. I assume, in cases like this, that the facts are wrong."
--Andy Rooney, My War
