LIBRARY JOURNAL HAS just listed the best memoirs of 2013. I say hurrah and yippee, since not only do I love any good promo of great memoir, but also because the writers of several of these books have been guest bloggers here on The Memoir Project.
It’s possible that writer Monica Wesolowska had the biggest impact on me this year in terms of what I learned about writing memoir. And it’s this: Be brave. In fact, be fearless. Nothing less describes the author’s writing on the kind of loss that, I suspect, nearly every other publisher but the marvelous and intelligent Hawthorne Books might have turned down. For the Memoir Project’s Writing Lessons series, the author took on the first essential rule of memoir writing. If you have not yet read it, read it now and learn.
Absolutely next in my own list of books from which I learned a great deal this year is Her by Christa Paravanni. I’m glad Library Journal agrees. Right after I read it, I included the book on my suggested reading list of memoirs for my students. For a review of the memoir, Her, by Christa Parravani, you have no further to look than right here.
Do you remember which author it is who the great Tom Robbins proclaimed as “the most soulful, insightful, funny and altogether luminous ‘under-known’ writer in America?” He is referring to Poe Ballantine, of course, whose Writing Lessons entry explored how to explore self knowledge through memoir. Ballantine’s book, Love & Terror on The Howling Plains of Nowhere, is listed as a book to remember from this year, as is Bootstrapper, by the unforgettable Mardi Jo Link, who in the course of her first post-divorce year won a zucchini growing contest, gathered enough firewood to heat her home, survived a ten-day flu and lived to write about it all in her perfect memoir. Her topic for the Writing Lessons series was all about how to quiet the voices in your head and write for yourself.
I love a good list.
For more from the Library Journal’s best books of 2013, see here.
