Memoir

"That was the morning that white people finally realised the president of the United States was a white supremacist, he'd as good as said so, there was a cartoon in the Guardian of the White House with a Klan hood over the roof. Why were people surprised, weren't they listening to anything? ... People weren't sane anymore, which didn't mean they were wrong.  Read more

I first came across Philip Larkin's poems as a schoolboy in the late nineteen-sixties, when I began taking English "A" level and my teacher Peter Way asked our class to talk about Larkin's poems "Wires" and "At Grass." At the time, I had no great interest in poems, but I was interested in these two partly because (as a country boy) I thought that they both had a mistake in them.  Read more

In his book "Memoir: An Introduction," from 2011, the scholar G. Thomas Couser argues that we go to the genre not so much for detail or style as for "wisdom and self-knowledge," for what the main character, who is always the author, has learned. Sometimes, though, the style is the lesson.  Read more

While writing her first memoir, The Liar's Club, Mary Karr was so exhausted she napped every day like a cross-country trucker. This was unusual for her, a single mom and a full-time college professor who usually needed just a few hours of sleep at night. Eventually, she identified the cause: The intense emotional workout of writing a memoir was causing her actual, physical exhaustion.

I once knew a woman who had been famously kidnapped as a child. She confessed to me that she longed to talk about her kidnapping, but no one ever brought it up. "Why?" she wondered. The story had been in print, after all, the subject of national headlines; it preceded her into every room. She was left with an acute sense of apartness, her unspoken story roiling inside her.  Read more