Thank you so much for making the distinction between writing a memoir and writing an autobiography. That really helped me understand and re-frame how to enter the work I want to do. I am 49 and before going back to grad school or making some other life changes, I really need to integrate what the heck these 49 years have been about. I want to take my wisdom out into the world but first I need to know who I am.

I am thankful to your for saying it took you a year to research your autobiography and a year to write it. What permission it gave me!

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing your wisdom online.

I’ve just found your blog and am amazed at what I have learned so far about memoir writing.

I’ve spent the past twelve years – on and off- writing my memoir. Like yours, it turned out to be a huge book of seven hundred pages! I self published it in hard cover form for my family and a few friends who were interested and don’t intend on selling that edition. When I started it, it was meant to be for the general public but my family kept insisting that I put this in and that in and so, you get the drift.

I’m in the process of rewriting it but although I have cut out a lot of content, I’m still faced with a huge manuscript. Sometimes I am overwhelmed with the task before me, yet I have a passion to share my story. I have a beginning- loss and confusion- a middle – coasting along, but not really living – and a rather dramatic and satisfactory ending. All the ingredients, I hope, for a story that will entice readers.

Some of my friends told me that they couldn’t put my book down.They said that it read like a thriller. Someone else said that I seemed to have an instinctive feel in knowing how to entice the reader to turn the page and start the next chapter to find out what happened to the person telling the story. All well and good but I am not a celebrity. I feel disheartened when I read that, by and large, people do not buy memoirs written by ordinary people who have done nothing but live their simple ( in my case, painful) lives.

Yet, I picked up Harry Bernstein’s “The Invisible wall” and what an inspiration to me that was. I am only sixty seven, a mere baby compared to him at ninety eight ! Was it just luck for him to find a publisher or was it simply sheer persistence on his part? Personally, I didn’t find the book as good as Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes”but I am encouraged by the fact that he continues to write and get published. I wish he had a blog. I’d love to know more about him.

Anyway, I want to thank you for all the wonderful knowledge you are compiling on the subject and wish you luck with your own memoir. I’ll let you know how I’m doing with my rewriting as it chugs along. You have inspired me to keep going. Talk to you again soon.

I’m glad you could make it to the teleseminar at National Association of Memoir Writers. The internet offers so many amazing ways to connect, I have to hold myself back from gushing about “miracles” and “magic” of the Twenty First Century. I know what you mean about how much time it takes to blog. But instead of a distraction, I think of blogging as a sort of self-publishing, and so it is one of the ways I do what I love — write for readers.

Jerry

I adore fractals, but never thought of them as a metaphor for writing one’s life story. It is absolutely appropriate– a wonderful metaphor! Thanks.

I am sure you will find just the right focal distance for your memoir. I love the process of reading,blogging, networking, etc. so much that I am not doing very much memoir writing itself these days.