Latest posts
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The Genius of an Uplifting Memoir Conclusion
This Is How I Save My Life: From California to India, a True Story of Finding Everything When You Are Willing to Try Anything by Amy B. Scher At the beginning of Amy Scher’s memoir, This is How I save My Life, she is riddled with pain, weakened in every muscle of her body. Her young life is drowning in a blur of doctors, medications, and crises. She has tried everything. Nothing works. But she, and her parents, are not ready to give up. And then, along comes an experimental stem-cell treatment at a small clinic in New Delhi, India.…
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Should you include romance in your memoir?
The process of getting together with a romantic partner is so psychologically complex, and so fraught with pitfalls and doubts, it makes perfect raw material for a memoir. Then why have I seen so few bestsellers centered on this theme? Perhaps the subject has been so over-reported in fiction that some memoir authors might fear that mentioning their own romance will sound cliché. Others might be reluctant to reveal such an intimate insight into their hearts. And yet, as the Memoir Revolution continues to mature, every possible life experience is finding its way into a book length story. It’s just…
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Memoirs are a path toward mutual respect
Growing up Jewish gave me a front row seat to the hatred proudly on display against people of other races, not only in Europe but right here in my own country. By the time I arrived in college, the signs posted on beaches and restaurants throughout the American South – No Jews or Blacks Allowed –had been reluctantly taken down, and I happily assumed that the American promise of universal equality was heading in the right direction. Sadly that optimistic belief has been challenged by the presence of video cameras in everyone’s pockets, which document the fact that something is…
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Ancestor Research Memoirs Give History a Voice
When I was a teenager, in the sixties, I loved to read novels about the previous hundred years. Authors such as Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Ernest Hemingway led me on astonishing journeys through the worlds that existed before my time. Mysteriously, though, it never occurred to me to ask my parents about their own earlier lives, or the stories their parents might have told. Today, 60 years later, I feel bewildered by my teen preference for the written words of strangers, while ignoring the history living within the people who raised me. In my fifties, I discovered the Memoir…
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Writing a life: memoir or autobiography?
It’s that “and more” that pushed me to deepen my understanding of the sometimes-subtle differences between autobiography and memoir, a distinction that continues to plague memoir writers struggling to decide how much to keep into their growing manuscripts.
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How memoirs increase empathy
During my training to become a therapist, one of the more esoteric instructions I received was that when a client told me about their situation, I was supposed to pay attention to my own feelings.
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Losing yourself to find your new truth
Merging yourself in the Other In my early teens I learned how to lose myself by entering into the minds of detectives and space adventurers. In more recent years, I’ve shifted to actual people, whose memoirs enable me to leave my life for a while and enter theirs. After years of memoir reading, I am a well-seasoned lifestory traveler, but the variety of human experience is so vast, I continue to encounter surprising, insightful, unique adventures. I recently completed such a vicarious journey with a young woman named Erica Elliott who, when she was trying to figure out what to…
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Checklists for Memoir Writers
To write a memoir, you have to carve out a few minutes each day to make progress. Despite the apparent simplicity of this requirement, many, if not most, aspiring writers consistently find it difficult to prod themselves to act. The problem is that at any given moment there are a thousand other things to do, and in order to write, you need to convince yourself this task is more important than the other 999. To understand why that is so difficult, consider the primary job for which your brain evolved – survival. You have a strong motivation to go to…
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Self help for memoir writers
Teaching self-help workshops to writers was a new venture for me. Instead of just thinking about these techniques for myself, I began to see them as shareable skills writers can learn together.
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How to become a storyteller
During the years it has taken me to learn to write my story and teach others how to find theirs, I have become increasingly aware that we all have storytelling burned deep in our souls. And so, becoming a storyteller is a journey to discover what you already contain.