On this blog, I have frequently offered excerpts of my mother’s memoir, We Were Not Spoiled. It has been such a satisfaction for me to have written her story and to have been able to hand her a copy. One day, after I had presented her with the hard copy of We Were Not Spoiled, […]
A guest post Three Stages of Writing a Memoir: Own Your Truth; Find Your Voice; Tell Your Story In December 2011, I decided to take a trip to my home country, Azerbaijan. I had a property to sell and family to visit there. More importantly, I was on a mission to find my father’s grave. […]
Besame, besame mucho / Como si fuera esta noche la última vez… Kiss me, kiss me a lot / As if tonight were the last time… Cesaria Evora’s voice, strong and oh! so beautiful, comes in from the livingroom as I pour myself coffee in the kitchen. It is early morning, and I am thinking […]
“If you call a book a memoir, the understanding is that to the best of your knowledge the facts, and what can be verifiable, are the truth. …”
Here’s a recent discussion we had with Libby Atwater who began telling people’s stories professionally after a career in education. As a writer and editor, she has worked for individuals, families, businesses, nonprofits, universities, and community newspapers. Tales from her life have been published in several anthologies. Her memoir What Lies Within covers her first […]
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Collect memories at my fiftieth class reunion Last weekend—and a warm sunny three days it turned out to be—I spent, as I had written that I would in the last newsletter, with those of my my high school classmates who could attend our fiftieth high-school reunion. Some of us had not seen each other in […]
James Frey became a household name. His book Bright Shiny Morning, released after the scandal, was a bestseller. His lie only seemed to make him more popular. I can understand how a reader would feel betrayed.
Interviewing family members and friends is clearly a form of research, but interviews alone are usually not enough to give your stories the depth they require. For that, you need formal research. Perhaps you already know enough about the period in which you or an ancestor lived to write about it convincingly and fully. It […]