How Many Memoir Types Are There?
There used to be one and not several memoir types.
The one kind of memoir genre was that written by famous people about the important events in history that they had taken part in. Mostly, these accounts were about how wonderful they were and how important their roles in history had been. Oftentimes, these memoirs were about excoriating their political or business rivals and actually provided little emotional or psychological insight into the protagonist other than s/he was a “good guy.”
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Today, we have more kinds of memoir types—or genres—than we could have imagined even only several generations ago. The Memoir Writer’s Blog has a whole category devoted to types of memoir,
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Discovering My New Home
This is an excerpt from a memoir I am thinking of calling either In Another Century or A Very Catholic Boy. I am 13, and in the previous excerpt, I have just arrived at the seminary high school where I will be living. The excerpt starts as I have brought my trunk up to the […]
Kate Christensen talks about writing Blue Plate Special / An Autobiography of My Appetites and about writing in general.
In her memoir, novelist Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man and the The Astral Hotel, has undertaken to organize her lifestory around food. It is an interesting concept, a theme, around which to make sense of a lifetime. If the memoir is, as Rainer Maria Rilke said of poetry, a momentary order, then Kate Christensen has done just that.
“Kate Christensen always remembers what she ate, what was served, what was cooked, what she cooked, what it tasted like,” reads the book jacket. “…much of her life, she describes herself as being ‘a hungry lonely wild animal looking for happiness and stability.’ Having found them at long last, she finally feels able to write about her search.”
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The Memoir Writer’s Blog—a Successful Blog?
This post is the 300th on my blog. I am amazed at the number. I realize that other blogs have more posts but even so, 300 is an achievement. I want to honor that I have been writing my own posts and curating guest posts for a while now and have achieved this constancy—300 posts. […]
When I Arrived at the Seminary
An excerpt from my high school memoir. It wasn’t until my father turned onto Middle Street and drove the 1955 red Ford station wagon up the hill towards the seminary that I gave in to the looming presence of doubt. Was this really what I wanted?
The Summer Before I Left
At 13, as I moved tremulously into adolescence, I knew that, whatever I did, I was leaving childhood and my life would soon be different from what it had been, but I could not appreciate how the difference would be marked not in age but in culture.
Louis Ledoux and Marie Valiquet Marry
During his first decade in Canada, Louis did not marry. While his friend Adrien Sénécal was growing a family, Louis remained single, paying (one presumes) the bachelor tax. In the early 1670s, Louis moved from one settlement to another, but, by the end of the decade, he had become an habitant in Varennes where he […]
Preparing to Leave Home
In the summer of 1960 when I was thirteen, my mother drove me into Lewiston to Vincent & Leblanc’s on Lisbon Street at Ash Street. There, in a shopping spree that was unprecedented, she bought me more new clothes than I’d ever had at any one time.
Writing the right memoir
not writing the right memoir can constrict your writing. The person who has put down one memoir a number of weeks, or months or even years ago, may not be able to pick it up again because the energy that had initially informed it is gone. The memoir has become the wrong memoir to be […]