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Kindle Notes & Highlights
a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.
One not-really-a-joke saying in my family is, “The trouble started when you hit me back.”
No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money,” Samuel Johnson said.)
What’s the test of beauty? Rereading. A memoir you return to usually feels so intimate—believable, real—that you’re lured back time and again.
everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little.
Each great memoir lives or dies based 100 percent on voice.
Whatever people like about you in the world will manifest itself on the page. What drives them crazy will keep you humble. You’ll need both sides of yourself—the beautiful and the beastly—to hold a reader’s attention.
As Hubert Selby told Jerry Stahl, “If you’re writing about somebody you hate, do it with great love.”
Facing a listing drunk or a footsore commuter, you figure out pretty quick how irrelevant much of your drivel is.
