More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You have to narrow the focus of the story so it has the push of a creek in a narrow spot.
It’s not just a function of prejudice. The publishing industry is under so much pressure. A writer gets a book deal, and the book gets trotted out for six weeks, and if it doesn’t sell, it’s gone. So many young writers go through that. They don’t have a shot at a second or third book. That’s a real problem that’s industry-wide for all writers.
Go back to the old ’hood; walk by your old house. You count the rooms, you eat the food, you drink the coffee, you sit in the bar, you go to the gas station and ask for directions. You have to breathe the air. Nothing might come of any of it, but you can’t train just one muscle. You have to train the whole body.
Raised by Orthodox Jews, Dani Shapiro has wrestled with religion and spirituality, the subject of her bestselling 2010 memoir, Devotion, since childhood—internally, and on the page. “I could no more reject my Judaism,” Dani told an interviewer, “than reject being female, or being a mother, or a wife, or a writer, or any of the things that most define me.”
Slow Motion, 1998 Devotion, 2010
Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein
Particularly in writing Slow Motion, I had a willingness to reveal some unattractive, difficult, unethical, complex aspects of my own behavior. It was part of my history that I was trying to excavate and take and shape. But I didn’t feel I was exposing myself; rather, I was creating that persona, that character.
The writer sitting at her desk knows whether she’s in the territory of imagination or in the territory of memory.
Memoirists have to cull and pick and choose and be very discerning about what we put in and leave out of our stories. There should be a sign above the desk of every memoirist that reads, “Everything doesn’t belong.”
In memoir you’ve already had the pathos, the action, the plot. The question is which story you’ll tell, which window you’ll look through. What’s the frame around that story? What’s the art in the telling? What’s the discovery? I know what happened, so now what? What’s interesting about this? What’s a narrative that’s interesting to read, to write? You’re putting pieces together to see what kind of music they make. It’s like stitching together a quilt, creating order that isn’t chronological order—it’s emotional, psychological order.
I waited until the book was in galleys to give it to my mother. Here’s what I learned: it was useless to have worried about what would upset her. She was angry about tiny details in the book that I hadn’t even considered, and yet the things I did think would upset her sailed right by. The moral of the story was, We can’t know what is going to impact another person, or why. After I gave my mother the galleys, her therapist called and asked me to meet with her. What can I say? We were all New York Jews. I gave the therapist a set of galleys so she could read it before my mother did. After she
...more
Beautiful Boy, 2008
Nic was older and had already committed to speaking openly about his addiction in his book, Tweak.
If there was something I was afraid of telling about myself—because I was embarrassed, or afraid of judgment—I determined at the beginning that I was going to tell it.
There’s a saying in AA, “You’re as sick as your secrets.” There’s an intensely powerful freedom when you decide you’re not going to keep secrets anymore.
Don’t take writing a memoir lightly. Take your time. Do your work. Second-guess and third-guess yourself in terms of what to keep and what to cut. Accept nothing short of the truth.
More Than It Hurts You, 2008
But there are fewer excellent memoirs. Why? When they fail, often it’s because you can sense some protection in every paragraph. The author has two purposes: one, to tell the story; two, to make himself look good, to protect himself.
I know now it takes boldness to write a good memoir;
I’m a hider. It felt weird to write about myself. It was profoundly uncomfortable.
I once talked to Dani Shapiro about truth and memory in memoir. We agreed that remembering the best you can is okay, as long as you’re not lying. A memoir is not a history book. It’s a record of your life as you remember it. You could write the same story every ten years, and each book might be less accurate than the last—but the accuracy won’t necessarily determine which is a better book. We don’t judge memoirs by that criterion.
What makes a memoir isn’t just what you remember; it’s your insights about what you remember.
The anxiety went away once I realized that I had to look at writing a memoir the same way I write a novel—that this was a story about a character who’s flawed, and all I had to do was expose that character, flaws and all.
In real life, we do inappropriate things at inappropriate times.
That convinced me to emphasize my flaws. Anywhere I had selfish, inappropriate thoughts, I kept them all in the book. Every chance I got, I made myself look bad. If nonfiction is any good, it has to be harder on the protagonist than on anybody else.
Those things that help us shape the story also help us shape our understanding of the events we’re writing about. I found it very advantageous in dealing with them.
To get bad reviews for a novel sucks. But bad reviews for a memoir feel exponentially worse, because they can be about you as a person.
Without the occasional surprise blockbuster, writers would have no excuse to believe that even if the last book failed to deliver wealth and fame, the next one will.
Tiny Beautiful Things, 2012
Pretty early on I learned that for better or worse I was going to use my life in my writing, whether in fiction or nonfiction.
So I had to make myself ready for a life in which I share the most private parts of myself with the public. I didn’t learn how to do that all at once. It’s a muscle you work and build over time.
There’s an ache inside me that’s soothed only by writing.
I try to go one or two sentences beyond what I feel safe saying. Honestly, that’s where it’s at—the one sentence that makes you bolt out of your chair because after you write it you feel someone lit your hands on fire. I’m
I’m talking about necessity, about telling the deepest truth at the right moment and being in command of that.
My work doesn’t hinge on shock value. I tell only what needs to be told for the work to reach its full potential. I’m not interested in confession. I’m interested in revelation.
Good writing is built on craft and heart. Another way of saying it is you must do your work and it must cost you everything to do it.
Bad Mother, 2009
Every once in a rare while I will think, Oh, God, what will my mother say? Then I tell myself to keep going, I can cut the offending bit out later on. In fact, I don’t usually cut it; I just need that mantra to give myself permission to keep writing.
The truth is 100 percent protection against libel.”
The story is personal and it’s true and it’s real, but it’s also constructed.
The reader thinks they know all of you, but they know only the piece that you choose to reveal in the way you choose to reveal it. If you’re doing your job, you’re revealing your story and your characters thoughtfully and carefully.
she was asking me at every point to offer some judgment, some assessment of these events.
She kept telling me to dig deeper, to look at myself in the past, to figure out why that cellar meant something to me.
Unlike with fiction, it’s easiest to write a memoir from an outline. You have your experience and your truth to draw from, but there’s so much there. You’re whittling away at your life to find the story underneath. An outline helps.
You get the most powerful material when you write toward whatever hurts. Don’t avoid it. Don’t run from it. Don’t write toward what’s easy. We recognize our humanity in those most difficult moments that people share.
Inside a Pearl, 2014
You have to have an opinion.
When you write memoir, the voice is very important. It needs to be very companionable for the reader.
Use some novelistic techniques so you don’t just have voices talking in the dark. Make your reader see and smell and feel things by using sensual details.
