While writing my memoir, 'When Skateboards Will Be Free,' I would sometimes have to pore over hours of microfilm at the New York Public Library in order to try to get one obscure detail right. For instance, was the Socialist Workers Party originally called the American Workers Party or the Workers Party of the United States?
The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.
Tobias Wolff is a hell of a writer, but you knew that already. His first memoir, 'This Boy's Life,' was a Huck Finn story set in the Eisenhower era - a story so rich and wounding that not even Hollywood could make a bad movie out of it.
With memoir, you have the clay of your life to work with. When you're writing a novel, you have to make the clay first.
At its best, fiction cultivates fantasy and compassion; at its worst, memoir provokes schadenfreude and prurience. The ugly truth, I fear, is that many people are drawn to sensational memoirs for the same reason they watch 'The Apprentice': they like to witness actual suffering, before-your-very-eyes humiliation.
You don't have to be a member of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute to figure out that when you title a memoir of your parents 'Them,' you're performing an act of distancing.
Maybe I will write a memoir, perhaps I'll do some essays, or maybe I will write a mystery story.
I never recreate dialogue. I have often been asked by people, 'You must have made this up because this is dialogue, right?' Anything in my books that is in quotes comes from some kind of living historical document: a letter, a memoir, a court transcript, a newspaper interview.
I wrote a novel. It's called 'The Middlesteins.' It's fiction. It's not a memoir. I'm not a spokesperson.
A memoir is not an autobiography. It's a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he's writing a novel. But it's got to be true.
What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.
I think Henry Miller has had huge influence not because he wrote about sex, but because the memoir or the nonfiction novel has become such a monumental force in American publishing, if not in literature.
Life Among the Savages is a disrespectful memoir of my children.
Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that's what - that whole oversharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder. And I'm not saying that every, you know, I'm not accusing every memoirist of being bipolar. But I think in a way it's kind of a gift.
I'm halfway through Patti Smith's memoir 'Just Kids,' which is heart-stoppingly vivid. It drips with beauty and hope and devastating candour. I don't want it to end.
I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir 'Goodbye to All That,' and a civilian memoir, 'Testament of Youth,' by Vera Brittain.
I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.
I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring.
In terms of going back and forth between fiction and nonfiction - in which I'll include memoir, biography, and true crime - is that one relieves the other.
The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.
A hidden nerve is what every writer is ultimately about. It's what all writers wish to uncover when writing about themselves in this age of the personal memoir. And yet it's also the first thing every writer learns to sidestep, to disguise, as though this nerve were a deep and shameful secret that needs to be swathed in many sheaths.
All my journalism, all my books are first person, and it's all memoir. Even when I'm writing about the oil spill in the Gulf, it's all first person there.
When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.
I think one can be more honest in fiction than in a memoir.
As irony would have it, the very person who inspired me to write a memoir... was the only person to be ejected from it. My brother didn't appear in 'Out of Egypt.'
Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars - or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.
The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.
I only read the very best music books. Donald Fagan's memoir 'Eminent Hipsters' is great. Bob Dylan's memoir 'Chronicles' and Patty Smith's 'Just Kids' are both incredible.
'Dreams from My Father' was not a memoir or an autobiography; it was instead, in multitudinous ways, without any question a work of historical fiction.
A memoir is always the most authentic telling of a situation, but a novel gets to different places.
I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.
I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.
I am exhausted by traditional memoir. I am exhausted by the architecture of the conventional novel.
'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.
I did not set out to write another novel. One day I sat down with the thought of trying my hand at a piece of nonfiction, a personal memoir of youth, but over the next several weeks, without intending it, the work began evolving into what has become 'Tomcat in Love.'
I have no sense of a model or predecessor when I write a memoir: For me, the form exists as a method of processing material that retains too many connections to life to be approached strictly and aesthetically. A memoir is a risk, a one-off, a bastard child.
