Memoir Writers: Be Like Wayne Thiebaud—An Obsessive Thief

By Vickie Barret

Years ago, during a writing class with a gifted and generous writer-teacher, the topic of what to read while writing came up. I looked to our writer-teacher for a singular answer, and without hesitation, he explained that he couldn’t read anything in the same genre he happened to be writing in.

It was an important, self-evident rule: when writing a memoir, don’t read memoirs; same goes for fiction.

I bristled. Because at the time, I wasn’t just casually reading a mem...