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Kindle Notes & Highlights
fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.
It’s the disparities in your childhood, your life between ass-whippings, that throws past pain into stark relief for a reader. Without those places of hope, the beatings become too repetitive—maybe they’d make a dramatic read for a while, but single-note tales seldom bear rereading.
A believable voice notes how the self may or may not be inventing reality, morphing one’s separate “truths.” Most of us don’t read the landscape so much as we beam it from our eyeballs.
In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer’s struggle for self often serves as the book’s organizing principle, and the narrator’s battle to become whole rages over the book’s trajectory.
Even a writer with gargantuan external enemies must face off with himself over a book’s course. Otherwise, why write in first person at all?
“If you’re writing about somebody you hate, do it with great love.”