MY MOST RECENT BOOK, The Memoir Project, A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text on Writing & Life (Grand Central Publishing), was the love child born from my years of teaching memoir writing. This is the book to read to learn to write memoir. With no writing prompts, time-wasting exercises or bumper-sticker adages, this book teaches you what I call writing with intent, a clear path to getting your work done to your – and the reader’s – delight. Start with reading it as step two on a path you can take with me. It may very well be all you need, or so thousands of readers tell me.
Irreverent, funny, and written from the perspective of someone who started her career at The New York Times and went on to write and publish four mass-market books, read her essays on NPR’s All Things Considered and write op-eds and essays for some of the best publications in the world — and wants to teach you to do the same — this book was written with you in mind.
The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life (Grand Central Publishing) is the book to get you started writing memoir.
My Previous Books
Most of my work includes a large helping of memoir, including The Roots of Desire: The Myth, Meaning and Sexual Power of Red Hair (Bloomsbury), which chronicles the entire wild history of red hair from the beginning of story right through witchcraft, art, and fashion, and was written from my redhead perspective, to Another Name for Madness (Houghton Mifflin), the dramatic tale of my family’s struggle with our mother’s Alzheimer’s disease.
I co-authored (with famed forensic pathologist Michael Baden) Dead Reckoning (Simon and Schuster), for which I did what’s known as participatory journalism, attending blood spatter analysis and forensic entomology schools, autopsies, trade shows of toes tags, body bags, and rib clippers, and pretty much everything else in between. That one let me fully explore the great dictum to “write what scares you,” since my lifelong terror of blood lent the book a definitive edgy pitch.
