Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature

by Meredith Maran

I had a quote by Anaïs Nin that I’d kept on my desk while I was writing The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, and I dug it out and copied it for Ann, and we both kept it on our desks while we were writing Pomegranates. It reads, “The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.”