How to Write Memoir? It’s Simple. Just Read Roger Rosenblatt
YOUR MEMOIR IS NOT ABOUT YOU. So stay out of it,” and with those eleven words, the great Roger Rosenblatt became my absolute favorite teacher of how to write memoir. It’s not merely that I agree with him – or he with me. It’s not that simple.
It’s that Rosenblatt lives those words and with them, not in spite of them, creates perfect books, and that he has done so again with his latest, The Boy Detective, A New York Childhood.
Don’t know his work? Drop what you are reading and read him. But first read what he had to say about the much-needed absence of you in your memoir writing, in this piece in USA Today.
His contributions to Time and PBS have won him two George Polk Awards, a Peabody Award, and an Emmy Award. Author of five Off-Broadway plays and more than a dozen books, including the national bestseller Rules for Aging and Children of War, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, he is nothing short of an American treasure.
Get a sample of his prefect previous memoirs, Making Toast and Kayak Morning, by reading this New York Times piece about them. Study him, and do not write another word until you do.
Love this quote! And the piece in USA today. The flip side of this advice is probably to remember that my memoir IS about me, and so I have to watch out for places where I make general assumptions about everyone else. Editing my own work, I often go back and take out phrases like “you feel,” and replace them with “I feel” — more exposed, more vulnerable, yes, but also more immediate. So, maybe the trick is to somehow be both specific and personal AND universal. At the same time. Which is why writing good memoir is so hard!
Yes, Katrina, I think you are right. How grand of you to make us think even more deeply about what goes into good memoir. The one thing I know for sure is that a writer reading to me from his or her datebook is never the model to shoot for, and that considered observation, fine writing and cold-blooded editing are always included. Many thanks for coming by. Hope to see you here again soon.
“that he drifts suggests a mourner unmoored.” This hit the mark. Drifting has been my life for the past two years, since the realization that my daughter’s death demanded a whole new attention. The memoir I am writing parallels those outer journeys of house sitting and travel stories with an inner ‘healing’, and a global understanding that grief is everywhere. Glad to stay I have recently planted my soul at one address. The body and mind, however, still move of their own volition.
I loved Toast. Beautifully written. Somehow I missed his next book. Will read it for sure.