MY HUSBAND SINGS in a large chorale group, providing me on a regular basis with music of the season. Most recently what filled my home was the music of Easter, whose own particular brand of adulation and adoration got me thinking about how we praise others and how that is a tough assignment for writers. It is. Think not? Think again.

In writing, you can’t default to a repetitive chorus. And that’s for good reason, since while singing the same thing again and again provides emphasis and fervor, in writing the knowledge must be cumulative, not repetitive; what we learn in sentence number one must be built on in sentence two, paragraph three and chapter four. The knowledge grows, or the piece dies under the eyes of the reader, no matter how much the writer adores the subject.

The lesson? Hymns of pure adoration are best left to liturgical music and not for pieces of memoir.

How, then, to learn how to write memoir about love, using a spouse, child, parent or grandparent, a college roommate, perhaps, as the illustration? Here is my three-part plan to address that.

  1. Read Calvin Trillin
  2. Read Calvin Trillin
  3. And, oh yeah, read Calvin Trillin

Read Alice, Let’s Eat, and see not only how a man adores his wife but how he writes about it without once, ever in the book, as far as I can tell, using the word “adore.” Read Travels with Alice because it will reinforce everything you learned in Alice, Let’s Eat. Then read Remembering Denny, a tidy little book about American ambition illustrated by the life and death of a college classmate. And don’t stop there, of course, when there is so much more Trillin to enjoy.

I recently put myself on a strict diet of Trillin, and am making my way through his twenty-plus books, some of them for the third or fourth time. I do this when I have something big to write, choosing one writer and sticking to him or her. The one qualification must be that the writer is someone inimitable. While imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, it’s a waste of time for writers. You have you own voice, after all.

For my last three books I read only the marvelous William Maxwell while writing, his clean prose cleansing my pinging, over-stimulated brain every day. Right now it’s Trillin, my new best pal, whose ability to breeze is gorgeous. What do I mean by “breeze?” It’s a racetrack term used at morning exercises for letting the horse just run. Trillin breezes. The man just writes. He gets up and writes. He eats, he writes. He loves, he writes.

Now there is something deserving a hymn of praise.