Writing the Memoir Quotes

“A word of warning here. The events as you remember them will never be the same in your memory once you have turned them into a memoir. For years I have worried that if I turn all of my life into literature, I won't have any real life left - just stories about it. And it is a realistic concern: it does happen like that. I am no longer sure I remember how it felt to be twenty and living in Spain after my parents died; my book about it stands now between me and my memories. When I try to think about that time, what comes to mind most readily is what I wrote.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir

“If you want help in starting to write memoirs, you don't want to fall into the clutches of a famous writer who has been hired to teach at a writing workshop solely because of his name's ability to attract students, rather than because of any teaching skill. You should not have to grapple with someone who secretly thinks you should be writing about his life rather than your own.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir

“One last characteristic of the memoir that is important to recognize is one which also applies to essays, and which Georg Lukacs described as "the process of judging." This may seem problematic to some, since...we connect it with 'judgmental,' often used nowadays as a derogatory word. But the kind of judgment necessary to the good personal essay, or to the memoir, is not that nasty tendency to oversimplify and dismiss other people out of hand but rather the willingness to form and express complex opinions, both positive and negative.

If the charm of memoir is that we, the readers, see the author struggling to understand her past, then we must also see the author trying out opinions she may later shoot down, only to try out others as she takes a position about the meaning of her story. The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers. Without this attempt to make a judgment, the voice lacks interest, the stories, becalmed in the doldrums of neutrality, become neither fiction nor memoir, and the reader loses respect for the writer who claims the privilege of being the hero in her own story without meeting her responsibility to pursue meaning. Self revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir

“Susan Griffin describes it as a time when "there is no intrinsic authority to my words." "I...clean off my desk. I make telephone calls. I know I am avoiding the typewriter. I know that in my mind, where there might be words, there is simply a blankness. I may try to write and then my words bore me." But when the time is right, the waiting will have been worth it. "Because each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record." Excerpt from "Thoughts on Writing: A Diary," in The Writer on her Work.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir

“Whether or not you employ humor in dealing with difficult subjects, the tone of the writing is of the utmost importance. Personally, I can read about almost any subject if I feel a basic trust in, and respect for, the writer. The voice must have authority. But more than that, I must know that the writer is all right. If she describes a suicide attempt or a babysitter's cruelty to her, or a time of acute loneliness, I need to feel that the writer, not the character who survived the experience, is in control of telling the story....The tone of such pieces may be serious, ironic, angry, sad, or almost anything except whiny. There must be no hidden plea for help - no subtle seeking of sympathy. The writer must have done her work, made her peace with the facts, and be telling the story for the story's sake. Although the writing may incidentally turn out to be another step in her recovery, that must not be her visible motivation: literary writing is not therapy. Her first allegiance must be to the telling of the story and I, as the reader, must feel that I'm in the hands of a competent writer who needs nothing from me except my attention.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir

“Sometimes clues about form emerge as your material begins to shape itself: the words may start to fall into a pattern or follow a rhythm, and if you allow poetic language into your prose, the sounds of the words themselves may help you arrive at an appropriate form. If you stay alert, you will most likely get a glimpse of the form just when you begin to need it: a shape will appear that suggests the beginnings of a structure: something indefinable that you know is the right vehicle for exploring your story even further.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“Sometimes the form may seem to you like a container for the story—say, a pot. Of course you want the most beautiful pot you can make, as well as one that is the right size and shape for what it is to hold. However, you can’t just go and choose a pot from a pot store. Rather, you must make your own vessel as your material begins to take shape; you must work with it, mould it as the story expands, and let it swell where it wants to, or taper down to a fine mouth when necessary. Other times, the form may seem to come from the inside—more like a skeleton or a tree trunk. When you find that sturdy trunk and some of the main branches, then the foliage shapes itself naturally.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“Any well-written memoir is worth perusing with an eye to its structure.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“Nancy Mairs, in Remembering the Bone House,”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“It is no easier to write your own story well than it is to write anything else well. Like any other literary genre, memoir requires you, as Annie Dillard has said, “to fashion a text.” An important part of this crafting is finding the right form for your story—a structure that is more than simply an adequate vehicle for the facts. The form must actively enhance the subject matter, subtly reveal layers of meaning, and complement the shape of the story with its own pleasing structure.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“not an experience shared by most potential readers—I realized that, if I did it well, some of those readers could have that same experience of identification that I valued so much. Moments in my life might resonate with moments in theirs. They might even step right outside their familiar histories and share mine for a while.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“a story can stay buried in my memory for years and years, but the minute it surfaces into consciousness as a story idea, it is likely to get lost. If I don’t grab it as it begins to form itself as a narrative, it can become permanently erased, and even if I remember the general subject matter, the voice that started narrating in my mind eludes me.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“Susan Griffin describes it as a difficult time during which she fears “that there is no intrinsic authority to my own words.” “I…clean off my desk,” she says. “I make telephone calls. I know I am avoiding the typewriter. I know that in my mind, where there might be words, there is simply a blankness. I may try to write and then my words bore me.” But when the time is right, the waiting will have been worth it. “Because each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“One of your first tasks, then, is to ask yourself: why do I care about this? The answer will make you feel entitled to tell your own story—to accept that it is not only worthy of being written down but fit material for literature—something you want to revise and craft until it is beautiful.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“Self-revelation without analysis or understanding becomes merely an embarrassment to both reader and writer.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“The memoirist need not necessarily know what she thinks about her subject but she must be trying to find out; she may never arrive at a definitive verdict, but she must be willing to share her intellectual and emotional quest for answers.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“Dishonest writing is very often mediocre writing.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“While imagination certainly plays a role in both kinds of writing, the application of it in memoir is circumscribed by the facts, while in fiction it is circumscribed by what the reader will believe.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“you must remain limited by your experience, unless you turn to fiction, in which you can, of course, embrace people, places, and events you have never personally known.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“After all, not everything in a memoir is factually accurate: who can remember the exact dialogue that took place at breakfast forty years ago? And if you can make up dialogue, change the name and hair color of a character to protect the privacy of the living, or even—as some memoirists do—reorder events to make the story work better, how is that different from fiction? In memoir, the author stands behind her story saying to the world: this happened; this is true. What is important about this assertion is that it has an effect on the reader—he reads it believing it to be remembered experience, which in turn requires the writer to be an unflinchingly reliable narrator. In fiction, a story may be skillfully designed to sound like a true story told in the first person by a fictional character (who may be a quite unreliable narrator), but if the writer presents it as fiction, the reader will usually perceive it as fiction. Readers tend to look for, even to assume, the autobiographical in fiction, but they also recognize the writer’s attempt to fictionalize, just as they recognize in memoir the central commitment not to fictionalize. In”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“Vivian Gornick’s memoir Fierce Attachments”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“Moving both backward and forward in time, re-creating believable dialogue, switching back and forth between scene and summary, and controlling the pace and tension of the story, the memoirist keeps her reader engaged by being an adept storyteller. So, memoir is really a kind of hybrid form with elements of both fiction and essay, in which the author’s voice, musing conversationally on a true story, is all important.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“yet voice is something like the fingerprint of the writer—not the persona on the page but the writer with her own particular linguistic quirks, sentence rhythms, and recurring images. The memoirist needs to have this fingerprint too, even if she only speaks as herself.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“The great essayist Montaigne understood that “in an essay, the track of a person’s thoughts struggling to achieve some understanding of a problem is the plot, is the adventure.” Rather than simply telling a story from her life, the memoirist both tells the story and muses upon it, trying to unravel what it means in the light of her current knowledge.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit

“For women, deeply personal writing can also be described as a rebellion against the expected role, though in the case of women, the expectation is that we will be preoccupied with inner lives, with relationships, and with family, but that we will gear our stories to satisfy, flatter, or collude with our immediate circle.”
― Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit