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In choosing her subject, it’s not a bad idea for the memoirist to imagine that many others in her audience have undergone the same or a similar experience, and to write with that in mind. Any assumption to the contrary … Continue reading →

Ask four people the difference between a memoir and an autobiography and odds are you’ll get four different answers. For Gore Vidal a memoir is “how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history.” Will Rogers put it … Continue reading →

In his famous introduction to “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” Joseph Conrad describes his task as a fiction writer thus: “. . . to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above all, to make you see.” He might … Continue reading →

From up in a dogwood tree a young girl watches her mother weed a garden, while down on the ground below her less tree-worthy friend Peggy watches. This opening scene from a story evoking a young girl’s world, with its … Continue reading →