#memoir

People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me. ↗

— Dorothy Allison

#truth #biography

Writing fiction, especially a long work of fiction can be difficult, lonely job; it’s like crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub. There’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt. ↗

— Stephen King

#self-doubt #stephen-king #writing #writing-craft

I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime. ↗

— Joe Eszterhas

#director #had #her #his #i

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#between #books #calls #gray #gray area

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. ↗

— Leslie Fiedler

#american #because #become #force #had

Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form. ↗

— Carrie Fisher

#explanation #form #get #i #may

I've been a storyteller since I was six years old when my mother had her first series of electroshock therapy treatments. I made up stories to keep my sisters quiet while mom slept." Dear Deb "I didn't know how it felt to have cancer, but I knew about fear." Dear Deb "Two people have tried to kill me. The first person was my mother." Dear Deb "I used to believe there were big miracles and little miracles. But, I'm not so sure God measures miracles." Dear Deb "I was raised to believe forgiveness was a gift I was supposed to give the person who hurt me, but that felt like giving a bully an ice cream cone after he pushed me down on the playground." Dear Deb "Miracles are one of God's ways of getting our attention. I know he got mine. It's a miracle I'm here." Dear Deb ↗

— Margaret Terry

#inspirational-life #memoir #faith

Those who are close to us, when they die, divide our world. There is the world of the living, which we finally, in one way or another, succumb to, and then there is the domain of the dead that, like an imaginary friend (or foe) or a secret concubine, constantly beckons, reminding us of our loss. What is memory but a ghost that lurks at the corners of the mind, interrupting our normal course of life, disrupting our sleep in order to remind us of some acute pain or pleasure, something silenced or ignored? We miss not only their presence, or how they felt about us, but ultimately how they allowed us to feel about ourselves or them. (prologue) ↗

— Azar Nafisi

#father-daughter-relationship #iran #iranian-revolution #memoir #mother-daughter-relationship

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful. ↗

— Elie Wiesel

#i #memoir #must #say #truthful

She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as “confessional.” She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic’s courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional… I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don’t know how or why yet. ↗

— Kate Zambreno

#mary-maclane #memoir #writing #age