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Memoir Watch for June 2018

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One way to motivate yourself while you’re writing your own memoir is to read other people’s memoirs. At Write My Memoirs we like to keep you up to date on the upcoming autobiographies that will be available each season. Here are a few of the memoirs coming out in June alone. Follow us on Twitter for more!

Let the Whole Thundering World Come Home
Natalie Goldberg
Publication date: June 5
A potentially fatal form of cancer forces the author, a writing teacher and Zen enthusiast, to take a new approach to living and dying.

My Girls: A Lifetime with Carrie and Debbie
Todd Fisher
Publication date: June 5
Losing his mother, Debbie Reynolds, and sister, Carrie Fisher, just a day apart inspired Todd Fisher to share his family’s personal stories and photos.

Sick: A Memoir
Porochista Khakpour
Publication date: June 5
As Lyme Disease gains broader awareness, author Porochista Khakpour’s account of her own struggle with the condition is timely.

Hunger
Roxane Gay
Publication date: June 19
Prolific writer Roxane Gay looks at body image issues in the aftermath of her weight loss surgery.

Once Upon a Farm
Rory Feek
Publication date: June 19
The surviving half of a country music duo, the author chronicles his life with his young daughter in the two years since the death of his wife and singing partner, Joey Feek.

Room to Dream
David Lynch and Kristine McKenna
Publication date: June 19
Interviews with friends, family members and colleagues give director David Lynch’s memoir a biographical spin as he explores his creative projects and life’s journey.

Believe It: My Journey of Success, Failure, and Overcoming the Odds
Nick Foles
Publication date: June 26
The Philadelphia Eagles quarterback reveals how he miraculously came back from a torn ACL to lead his team to Super Bowl glory.

 

Three Mini-Memoirs Model Effective Writing

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Three Mini-Memoirs Model Effective Writing
Redwood Writers is a group of California writers who support each other’s writing efforts. The group holds writing contests throughout the year and has posted the top three winners of its 2013 Memoir Contest online. These mini-memoirs are a quick read and can provide inspiration in your own memoir writing:
First Place: The Egg Slicer by Simona Carini. This winning entry provides a model for crafting a chapter about what seems like a very minor aspect of your life. Carini skillfully uses something small—her affection for her mother’s egg slicer—to communicate much about her relationship with her mother, her grief upon her mother’s death and her process of finding her own voice at the feet of a daunting authority figure.
Second Place: Crimes of Passion by Jan Edwards. The second-place finisher gives the reader a glimpse into the mind of the occasional shoplifter. The author is boldly honest, neither apologizing nor analyzing beyond matter-of-factly reporting her own rationalizing. The writing keeps the reader engaged, and we want to know whether the behavior continues past the end of the vignette.
Third Place: Gulf Stream by Elspeth Benton. Sharing some blurry childhood memories, the author combines those seemingly accurate memories with speculation and questions. She’s skilled in turning her lack of information about her mother and grandfather into an interesting story. By exploring the motivations and behavior of people so directly connected to her, she’s implicitly looking inward as well, trying to define who she is in light of where she came from.
All three winners are good at focusing on just a couple of points in time in order to convey the passage of many years. You experience your life’s occurrences both as they happen and later when you remember them.
http://redwoodwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/EggSlicerMemoir2-3.pdf
http://redwoodwriters.org/wp-content/uploads/Crimes-of-Passion-light-edit-21.pdf
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Redwood Writers is a group of California writers who support each other’s writing efforts. The group holds writing contests throughout the year and has posted online the top three winners of its 2013 Memoir Contest. These mini-memoirs are a quick read and can provide inspiration for your own memoir writing:

First Place: The Egg Slicer by Simona Carini. This winning entry provides a model for crafting a chapter about what seems like a very minor aspect of your life. Carini skillfully uses something small—her affection for her mother’s egg slicer—to communicate much about her relationship with her mother, her grief upon her mother’s death and her process of finding her own voice at the feet of a daunting authority figure.

Second Place: Crimes of Passion by Jan Edwards. The second-place finisher gives the reader a glimpse into the mind of the occasional shoplifter. The author is boldly honest, neither apologizing nor analyzing beyond matter-of-factly reporting her own rationalizing. The writing keeps the reader engaged, and we want to know whether the behavior continues past the end of the vignette.

Third Place: Gulf Stream by Elspeth Benton. Sharing some blurry childhood memories, the author combines those seemingly accurate memories with speculation and questions. She’s skilled in turning her lack of information about her mother and grandfather into an interesting story. By exploring the motivations and behavior of people so directly connected to her, she’s implicitly looking inward as well, trying to define who she is in light of where she came from.

All three winners are good at focusing on just a couple of points in time in order to convey the passage of many years. You experience your life’s occurrences both as they happen and later when you remember them.

Favorite Memoirs: Final Installment

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Favorite Memoirs: Final Installment
As this three-part series comes to a close, I think you’ll enjoy the five favorite war memoirs listed by one of our Facebook friends. We’re quoting his comments on each.
1. Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean. Probably the best memoir I’ve ever read. It has three distinct sections. In Part I, it’s the 1930s and Mr. Maclean is a secret agent assigned to the British embassy in Moscow. Chased across Soviet Central Asia by the NKVD on horseback—literally— he later was one of the few Western eyewitnesses to the 1938 Soviet show trial of Nikolai Bukharin. In Part II, it’’s WWII and Mr. Maclean joins the British Army, becoming one of the founders of the Special Air Service, a commando unit that became famous for its daring raids behind Rommel’s lines in North Africa. In Part III, Mr. Maclean is summoned back to London to meet with Churchill, who appoints him his personal representative to the Yugoslav partisan leader Josef Broz Tito and parachutes him into Croatia to help lead guerrilla operations against the Nazis. (After the war, Mr. Maclean—who was one of only two men in the British Army to rise from the rank of private to brigadier general during the war—served as a member of Parliament representing the constituency of Bute and North Ayrshire, in southwest Scotland, on the Firth of Clyde. He also ran an inn, I believe.) You will not be able to put this book down.
2. With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, by E.B. Sledge. A sergeant in the 5th Marines during WWII, Mr. Sledge later became a biology professor at the University of Montevallo, in Alabama. He wrote his memoir to explain his wartime experiences to his family. His wife eventually persuaded him to publish it (in the early 1980s, I believe), whereupon it was discovered and championed by the late military historian John Keegan, who called it one of the greatest combat memoirs ever written. I agree.
3. Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser. At 17, the author, who later became famous for a ribald and brilliant series of novels known collectively as The Flashman Papers, enlisted in the British Army’s Border Regiment and was promptly sent off to Burma to kill Japanese. The title, incidentally, comes from the opening lines of Kipling’s Gunga Din: “You may talk o’ gin an’ beer / When you’re quartered safe out ‘ere, / An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it; / But if it comes to slaughter / You will do your work on water, / An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.”
4. Good-by to All That, by Robert Graves. Before he wrote I, Claudius, Mr. Graves was a British infantry officer in the trenches of the Western Front during the Great War. A real horror show rendered with ineluctable poignancy.
5. Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, 1941-1945, by Leo Marks. During WWII, Mr. Marks was head of communications for the Special Operations Executive, Churchill’s pet spy agency, where he revolutionized cryptography. Because of secrecy laws, Mr. Marks wasn’t able to tell his story—which is replete with tales of derring-do—until 1998. After the war, incidentally, Mr. Marks became a successful screenwriter and, oddly enough, played the voice of Satan in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

As this three-part Write My Memoirs series comes to a close, I think you’ll enjoy the five favorite war memoirs listed by one of our Facebook friends. We’re quoting his comments on each.

  1. Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean. Probably the best memoir I’ve ever read. It has three distinct sections. In Part I, it’s the 1930s and Mr. Maclean is a secret agent assigned to the British embassy in Moscow. Chased across Soviet Central Asia by the NKVD on horseback—literally— he later was one of the few Western eyewitnesses to the 1938 Soviet show trial of Nikolai Bukharin. In Part II, it’’s WWII and Mr. Maclean joins the British Army, becoming one of the founders of the Special Air Service, a commando unit that became famous for its daring raids behind Rommel’s lines in North Africa. In Part III, Mr. Maclean is summoned back to London to meet with Churchill, who appoints him his personal representative to the Yugoslav partisan leader Josef Broz Tito and parachutes him into Croatia to help lead guerrilla operations against the Nazis. (After the war, Mr. Maclean—who was one of only two men in the British Army to rise from the rank of private to brigadier general during the war—served as a member of Parliament representing the constituency of Bute and North Ayrshire, in southwest Scotland, on the Firth of Clyde. He also ran an inn, I believe.) You will not be able to put this book down.
  2. With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, by E.B. Sledge. A sergeant in the 5th Marines during WWII, Mr. Sledge later became a biology professor at the University of Montevallo, in Alabama. He wrote his memoir to explain his wartime experiences to his family. His wife eventually persuaded him to publish it (in the early 1980s, I believe), whereupon it was discovered and championed by the late military historian John Keegan, who called it one of the greatest combat memoirs ever written. I agree.
  3. Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser. At 17, the author, who later became famous for a ribald and brilliant series of novels known collectively as The Flashman Papers, enlisted in the British Army’s Border Regiment and was promptly sent off to Burma to kill Japanese. The title, incidentally, comes from the opening lines of Kipling’s Gunga Din: “You may talk o’ gin an’ beer / When you’re quartered safe out ‘ere, / An’ you’re sent to penny-fights an’ Aldershot it; / But if it comes to slaughter / You will do your work on water, / An’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.”
  4. Good-by to All That, by Robert Graves. Before he wrote I, Claudius, Mr. Graves was a British infantry officer in the trenches of the Western Front during the Great War. A real horror show rendered with ineluctable poignancy.
  5. Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker’s War, 1941-1945, by Leo Marks. During WWII, Mr. Marks was head of communications for the Special Operations Executive, Churchill’s pet spy agency, where he revolutionized cryptography. Because of secrecy laws, Mr. Marks wasn’t able to tell his story—which is replete with tales of derring-do—until 1998. After the war, incidentally, Mr. Marks became a successful screenwriter and, oddly enough, played the voice of Satan in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ.

Continued: The List of Favorite Memoirs

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Continued: The List of Favorite Memoirs
In the last post, we began compiling a list of our Facebook friends’ favorite memoirs so you’ll all have some “reference material” for writing your own memoirs. Here’s the next batch, along with the posters’ comments. Like Write My Memoirs on Facebook and give us some of your recommendations!
How To Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce. Comedy and tragedy intricately intertwined.
Try Stephen Fry’s The Fry Chronicles. Lighter (though it deals with some hard issues) with a healthy dose of humor and self-deprecation. It is refreshingly honest.
Similarly: Stephen Fry’s autobiography volumes Moab is my Washpot and The Fry Chronicles are worth reading, as he is such a splendid writer.
Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids.
Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton. An honest street smart chef makes good.
The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer. Fun one.
Marilyn Freund Try this; I think you might like it a lot—In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed.
If you want to read something tacky but quite riveting, read I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie by Pamela Des Barres and Dave Navarro. I really enjoyed it!
What It Is Like To Go To War by Karl Marlantes.
Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela.
Geoffrey Wellum’s First Light, an account of his life as a WWII Spitfire pilot, was absolutely absorbing.
Two Holocaust autobiographies: 1) The Lost Cellos of Lev Aronson by Frances Brent. It’s a Holocaust tale of music, struggle, ingenuity and survival, and it’s also a love story. 2) An Englishman in Auschwitz by Leon Greenman.
Still more to come next week!

In the last post, we began compiling a list of our Facebook friends’ favorite memoirs so you’ll all have some “reference material” for writing your own memoirs. Here’s the next batch, along with the posters’ comments. Like Write My Memoirs on Facebook and give us some of your recommendations!

  • How To Talk Dirty and Influence People by Lenny Bruce. Comedy and tragedy intricately intertwined.
  • Try Stephen Fry’s The Fry Chronicles. Lighter (though it deals with some hard issues) with a healthy dose of humor and self-deprecation. It is refreshingly honest. Similarly: Stephen Fry’s autobiography volumes Moab is my Washpot and The Fry Chronicles are worth reading, as he is such a splendid writer.
  • Patti Smith’s memoir, Just Kids.
  • Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton. An honest street-smart chef makes good.
  • The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer. Fun one.
  • Try this; I think you might like it a lot—In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed.
  • If you want to read something tacky but quite riveting, read I’m with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie by Pamela Des Barres and Dave Navarro. I really enjoyed it!
  • What It Is Like To Go To War by Karl Marlantes.
  • Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela.
  • Geoffrey Wellum’s First Light, an account of his life as a WWII Spitfire pilot, was absolutely absorbing.
  • An Englishman in Auschwitz by Leon Greenman.

Still more to come next week!

Good Memoir Reads This Fall

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Good Memoir Reads This Fall
Some of Write My Memoirs’ Facebook friends had a discussion about their favorite biographies and autobiographies in response to a friend who’d asked for recommendations. Here, we share the latter with their charming comments for your memoir-reading enjoyment this fall. We’ll continue the list next week.
If you like to read about suffering in USSR get Ida Nudel A hand in the darkness—a type of “Gulag” book.
The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. I didn’t realize it was a memoir when I bought it (go ahead and laugh at me), and almost didn’t read it. It’s one of my favorite books, and I loved it so much that I begged for Half Broke Horses for a Christmas gift. I think you’ll love them!
Elie Wiesel’s Night is good, but you have to be in the right frame of mind for that one.
Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn is really good. By Catherine Friend.
I’ll mention Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, by Jung Chang, though you’ve almost certainly read it already?
Did you read Life by Keith Richards? LOVED it.
If you’re into music, Who I Am by Pete Townshend is great.
I, Tina: My Life Story by Tina Turner. You probably can guess the main theme of the struggles she’s faced, but the details paint an even darker picture.
Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley.
Miles: The Autobiography, by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe Davis. Steel yourself for some colorful language, but you get used to it as you become caught up in his rhythms and cadences.

Some of Write My Memoirs’ Facebook friends had a discussion about their favorite autobiographies in response to a friend who’d asked for recommendations. Here, we share their selections along with their charming comments for your memoir-reading enjoyment this fall. We’ll continue the list next week.

  • If you like to read about suffering in USSR, get Ida Nudel’s A Hand in the Darkness—a type of “Gulag” book.
  • The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. I didn’t realize it was a memoir when I bought it (go ahead and laugh at me), and almost didn’t read it. It’s one of my favorite books, and I loved it so much that I begged for Half Broke Horses for a Christmas gift. I think you’ll love them!
  • Elie Wiesel’s Night is good, but you have to be in the right frame of mind for that one.
  • Hit by a Farm: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Barn is really good. By Catherine Friend.
  • I’ll mention Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, by Jung Chang, though you’ve almost certainly read it already?
  • Did you read Life by Keith Richards? LOVED it.
  • If you’re into music, Who I Am by Pete Townshend is great.
  • I, Tina: My Life Story by Tina Turner. You probably can guess the main theme of the struggles she’s faced, but the details paint an even darker picture.
  • Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley.
  • Miles: The Autobiography, by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe Davis. Steel yourself for some colorful language, but you get used to it as you become caught up in his rhythms and cadences.

Think Writing a Memoir Is Hard For You? Look at Susan Spencer-Wendel

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Think Writing a Memoir Is Hard For You? Look at Susan Spencer-Wendel
“…she found out her book would be published by HarperCollins. All she had to do was produce an 80,000 word manuscript in four months. On her iPhone. With one thumb.” And so, according to that report in The Huffington Post, Susan Spencer-Wendel, a victim of the ALS that was causing her body to rapidly degenerate, beat the deadline and wrote her 357-page memoir in just three months even though she could not move her arms. Her book, Until I say Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy, was published in spring 2013. Spencer-Wendel lost more bodily function throughout the summer but maintained her joy, and by August she’d found a tool that permitted her to write an essay from her hospice bed. To use the HeadMouse Extreme, she positioned her head to use a reflective dot attached to her nose as a pointer that moved the cursor over letters across her laptop screen.
To write your memoir, you probably can sit down at an ordinary computer and apply hands to keyboard. You can knock off a few chapters with your laptop on an airplane, or you can sit under a tree with a pen and legal pad.
I’m sharing Susan’s story not to “guilt you” into appreciating your health but, rather, to serve as inspiration and motivate you to share your experiences in a memoir before that health begins to erode. Unable to communicate easily, Susan put everything she wanted to say in one place. She made sure her three children would have a tangible way to remember their mom. In those ways, she’s just like every other memoirist—just like you. Read more about Susan here and here.
http://www.amazon.com/Until-Say-Good-Bye-Year-Living/dp/0062241451/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378132136&sr=8-1&keywords=susan+wendel
http://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/paralyzed-als-susan-spencer-wendel-writes-memoir-beauty-194500854.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-wendel/until-i-say-good-bye_b_3021001.html
http://www.medicaldaily.com/susan-spencer-wendel-author-als-inspired-write-again-thanks-loyal-companion-french-bulldog-named

“…she found out her book would be published by HarperCollins. All she had to do was produce an 80,000 word manuscript in four months. On her iPhone. With one thumb.” And so, according to that report in The Huffington Post, Susan Spencer-Wendel, a victim of the ALS that was causing her body to rapidly degenerate, beat the deadline and wrote her 357-page memoir in just three months even though she could not move her arms. Her book, Until I say Good-Bye: My Year of Living with Joy, was published in spring 2013. Spencer-Wendel lost more bodily function throughout the summer but maintained her joy, and by August she’d found a tool that permitted her to write an essay from her hospice bed. To use the HeadMouse Extreme, she positioned her head to use a reflective dot attached to her nose as a pointer that moved the cursor over letters across her laptop screen.

To write your memoir, you probably can sit down at an ordinary computer and apply hands to keyboard. You can knock out a few chapters with your laptop on an airplane, or you can sit under a tree with a pen and legal pad.

I’m sharing Susan’s story not to “guilt you” into appreciating your health but, rather, to serve as inspiration and motivate you to share your experiences in a memoir before that health begins to erode. Unable to communicate easily, Susan put everything she wanted to say in one place. She made sure her three children would have a tangible way to remember their mom. In those ways, she’s just like every other memoirist—just like you. Read more about Susan here and here.

Think You’re Funny? Write a Memoir

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Think You’re Funny? Write a Memoir
Everybody’s a comedian, right? If you’re witty and thinking about writing a funny book, you might want to start with a memoir. New writers are always advised to write about “something you know.” What do you know better than your own life? And if you’re naturally funny, you’ve no doubt been picking up comedy material for decades about your relatives, your pets, school, your workplace, colleagues, friends and the typical, yet absurd, situations in which we all find ourselves. Write out all of those stories, one by one, and soon you will have the chapters to your humorous memoir.
Coming from the opposite direction, you may start out to write an ordinary memoir and discover that through your writer’s eye everything comes out funny. Even though you document your life’s dry facts and chronicle some unpleasant milestones such as parents’ deaths, you may find that what you recall best are the amusing, often heartwarming anecdotes that accompany even the saddest occasions in your life. In developing your voice as a writer, you should embrace that approach not only because it’s your natural voice, but also because humor keeps the reader engaged.
As part of your research, read some funny memoirs! There are plenty available; catch these links on Bookish.com and more on Flavorwire.com. From The Lottery author Shirley Jackson’s 1953 autobiography, Life Among the Savages, to recent memoirs of comedy icons like I Hate Everyone…Starting With Me by Joan Rivers and Seriously…I’m Kidding by Ellen Degeneres, you will be laughing as you pick up tips for the construction and flow of a funny memoir.
http://www.bookish.com/articles/can-we-talk-recent-hilarious-memoirs-by-women?=edit1
http://flavorwire.com/281223/10-of-the-most-hilarious-memoirs-youll-ever-read

Everybody’s a comedian, right? If you’re witty and thinking about writing a funny book, you might want to start with a memoir. New writers are always advised to write about “something you know.” What do you know better than your own life? And if you’re naturally funny, you’ve no doubt been picking up comedy material for decades about your relatives, your pets, school, your workplace, colleagues, friends and the typical, yet absurd, situations in which we all find ourselves. Write out all of those stories, one by one, and soon you will have the chapters to your humorous memoir.

Coming from the opposite direction, you may start out to write an ordinary memoir and discover that through your writer’s eye everything comes out funny. Even though you document your life’s dry facts and chronicle some unpleasant milestones such as parents’ deaths, you may find that what you recall best are the amusing, often heartwarming anecdotes that accompany even the saddest occasions in your life. In developing your voice as a writer, you should embrace that approach not only because it’s your natural voice, but also because humor keeps the reader engaged.

As part of your research, read some funny memoirs! There are plenty available; catch these suggestions on Bookish.com and Flavorwire.com. From The Lottery author Shirley Jackson’s 1953 autobiography, Life Among the Savages, to recent memoirs of comedy icons like I Hate Everyone…Starting With Me by Joan Rivers and Seriously…I’m Kidding by Ellen Degeneres, you will be laughing as you pick up tips for the construction and flow of a funny memoir.

TV Genealogy Show Strikes a Chord

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TV Genealogy Show Strikes a Chord
As you write your memoir, you may seek information reaching back several generations. Or perhaps after writing a first memoir focusing on your life as you recall it, you will decide to develop a second, research-based book that documents your heritage.
If that topic interests you, you’re probably already a member of ancestry.com, tracing your roots and discovering fascinating information about the generations that preceded you. I suggest you also check out the TV show “Who Do You Think You Are?” This show was on NBC for three seasons, and after it was canceled it was picked up by TLC, which is now running a full season. Each episode follows the journey as a celebrity traces his or her ancestry, uncovering all sorts of interesting material. In the process, viewers learn how to go about a thorough genealogy search. The producers help the celebrities, of course, whereas you’re on your own! They do use ancestry.com to pull up documents, but they also meet with genealogists and view photos and paperwork in person. Perhaps you wouldn’t have as much access to these experts as the producers of a television show, but the professionals seem genuinely interested in enlightening descendants about relatives whose accomplishments have gone largely acknowledged. By the way, the TV show has a spinoff book of the same name.
If you do any sort of genealogical search and turn up interesting history, please email us at WriteMyMemoirs about it, and we will share here it on the blog.
http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/who-do-you-think-you-are
http://www.amazon.com/Who-You-Think-Are-Essential/dp/0143118919s

As you write your memoir, you may seek information reaching back several generations. Or perhaps after writing a first memoir focusing on your life as you recall it, you will decide to develop a second, research-based book that documents your heritage.

If that topic interests you, you’re probably already a member of ancestry.com, tracing your roots and discovering fascinating information about the generations that preceded you. I suggest you also check out the TV show “Who Do You Think You Are?” This show was on NBC for three seasons, and after it was canceled it was picked up by TLC, which is now running a full season. Each episode follows the journey as a celebrity traces his or her ancestry, uncovering all sorts of interesting material. In the process, viewers learn how to go about a thorough genealogy search. The producers help the celebrities, of course, whereas you’re on your own! They do use ancestry.com to pull up documents, but the celebrities also meet with genealogists and view photos and paperwork in person. Perhaps you wouldn’t have as much access to these experts as the producers of a television show, but the professionals seem genuinely interested in enlightening descendants about relatives whose accomplishments have gone largely unacknowledged. By the way, the TV show has a spinoff book of the same name.

If you do any sort of genealogical search and turn up interesting history, please email us at WriteMyMemoirs about it, and we will share here it on the blog.

Boil It Down: The Food Memoir

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Boil It Down: The Food Memoir
If you’re writing a memoir but finding yourself rambling without a narrative focus, you may want to jump on the food memoir bandwagon. Food memoirs are becoming so commonplace that the Literary Foodie blogger lists several hundred you might be interested in reading. Among the most popular are Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential; Blood, Bones & Butter, by Gabrielle Hamilton, Julie Powell’s book-to-movie Julie and Julia and Julia Child’s own My Life in France; Beaten, Seared and Sauced, by Jonathan Dixon; A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle and Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, by Ruth Reichl.
But let’s talk about you. If you’re not a celebrity chef or even a good cook, why might you want to write a food memoir?
We all eat, so food is something that draws in the reader. It’s multisensory; you can describe the look, texture, smell and taste. And it’s a memory trigger. We may be more likely to remember what we ate on a certain night at our favorite restaurant than who was in our company that evening. Everyone has dishes they associate with growing up, romances, routines, special dates and general indulging. By calling upon that aspect of your memory cache, you provide a focus and establish a consistent thread for your memoir. As an underlying theme, food can be symbolic, the topic lends itself to humor and a food memoir is the perfect vehicle if you want to write only about a limited period of your life.
http://literaryfoodie.blogspot.com/p/food-memoir-list.html

If you’re writing a memoir but finding yourself rambling without a narrative focus, you may want to jump on the food memoir bandwagon. Food memoirs are becoming so commonplace that the Literary Foodie blogger lists several hundred you might be interested in reading. Among the most popular are Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential; Blood, Bones & Butter, by Gabrielle Hamilton, Julie Powell’s book-to-movie Julie and Julia and Julia Child’s own My Life in France; Beaten, Seared and Sauced, by Jonathan Dixon; A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle and Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, by Ruth Reichl.

But let’s talk about you. If you’re not a celebrity chef or even a good cook, why might you want to write a food memoir?

We all eat, so food is something that draws in the reader. It’s multisensory; you can describe the look, texture, smell and taste. And it’s a memory trigger. We may be more likely to remember what we ate on a certain night at our favorite restaurant than who was in our company that evening. We all have dishes we associate with growing up, romances, routines, special life events and general indulging. By calling upon that aspect of your memory cache, you provide a focus and establish a consistent thread for your memoir. As an underlying theme, food can be symbolic, the topic lends itself to humor and a food memoir is the perfect vehicle if you want to write only about a limited period of your life.

Try Garner’s as a Reference for Grammar and Usage

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Try Garner’s American Usage as a Reference
So many questions about grammar cannot be answered simply yes/no, either/or. While we tend to think of grammar as cut-and-dried, it’s really more of a reflection of preferred usage at this moment in time—preferred rather than absolutely correct, and only at this moment because a living language is constantly changing. So a grammatical construction you learned in school 40 years ago may be less valid today. That’s less valid, not exactly wrong. Also, word choice, usage and even punctuation vary widely depending on your geography. Each English-speaking country seems to have its own rules.
For all of those reasons, for American writing I like a usage guide that’s not on everyone’s radar: Garner’s American Usage. Most people rely on a stylebook such as the AP Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style, or a dictionary like Webster’s or American Heritage. But unlike those references, which provide right-or-wrong information, Garner’s Modern American Usage includes the immensely helpful and sensible “Garner’s Language-Change Index,” a five-stage continuum of acceptability ranging from unacceptable to commonly preferred. Garner’s also is a fun read, adding information about the language and elaborating its points with humor.
A review by School Library Journal published on the Oxford University Press website calls Garner’s “the best of its kind in that it simply reports the facts in an engaging way; language evolves and usage changes. An invaluable ready-reference tool.”
http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage-Garner/dp/0195382757/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1366214307&sr=8-1&keywords=garner%27s+modern+american+usage
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Reference/EnglishUsageGuides/?view=usa&ci=9780195382754

So many questions about grammar cannot be answered simply yes/no, either/or. While we tend to think of grammar as cut-and-dried, it’s really more of a reflection of preferred usage at this moment in time—preferred rather than absolutely correct, and only at this moment because a living language is constantly changing. So a grammatical construction you learned in school 40 years ago may be less valid today. That’s less valid, not exactly wrong. Also, word choice, usage and even punctuation vary widely depending on your geography. Each English-speaking country seems to have its own rules.

For all of those reasons, for American memoir writing I like a usage guide that’s not on everyone’s radar: Garner’s American Usage. Most people rely on a stylebook such as the AP Stylebook or the Chicago Manual of Style, or a dictionary like Webster’s or American Heritage. But unlike those references, which gauge each case as right or wrong, Garner’s Modern American Usage includes the immensely helpful and sensible “Garner’s Language-Change Index,” a five-stage continuum of acceptability ranging from unacceptable to commonly preferred. Garner’s also is a fun read, adding information about the language and elaborating its points with humor.

A review by School Library Journal published on the Oxford University Press website calls Garner’s “the best of its kind in that it simply reports the facts in an engaging way; language evolves and usage changes. An invaluable ready-reference tool.”

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Then just set up a chapter and start writing your memoir. Don’t worry about rules. There are no rules to writing your memoir; there are only trends. These trends are based on techniques and features identified in current top-selling memoirs. At best, they’re the flavor of the month. If you’re capturing your life in print for your family, for your own gratification or to inspire readers, rather than aiming to set off Hollywood screenplay bidding wars, these trends don’t even apply to you. You’ll write the memoir that suits you best, and it will be timeless, not trend-driven.There are no rules, but there are four steps:

1. Theme/framework
2. Writing
3. Editing/polishing
4. Self-publishing

You’ve researched this, too, and you’ve been shocked at the price for getting help with any one of those steps, much less all four. That’s because most memoir sites promise to commercialize your work. They’ll follow a formula based on current memoir trends, because they want to convince you that they can turn your memoir into a best-seller. These sites overwhelm you with unnecessary information not to help you, the memoir author, but to address Search Engine Optimization (SEO) algorithms so they can sell more.

That’s not what we do at Write My Memoirs. Our small community of coaches, writers and editors are every bit as skilled as any you’ll find, and we charge appropriately for their expertise and the time they’ll spend helping you craft a compelling, enjoyable read. But you won’t pay an upcharge for other websites’ commercialization, the marketing that follows, and the pages of intimidating “advice.” You can sell your book if you like—we have ISBNs available for you—but our organic process of capturing your story takes a noncommercial path.

If you want help with any or all of the four steps above, choose from our services or save money by selecting one of our packages. If you’d like to talk about what’s right for you, schedule a call. One year from now, you can be holding your published memoir in your hand. And at that point, it will be a big deal!

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