memoir

Kate Christensen: “It is crucial to avoid grinding axes, settling scores and pointing fingers in your memoir”

The PEN/Faulkner winner talks about the differences in creating characters in memoir vs. fiction, plus finding happiness in Maine
July 19, 2016
Kari Howard

Jessica Stern on Memoir, Denial and Terror

Jessica Stern / Photo by Joel Benjamin Jessica Stern, a Harvard lecturer and fellow at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, is known…
February 9, 2015
Memoir's truthy obligations: a handy how-to guide

Memoir's truthy obligations: a handy how-to guide

How true does a memoir have to be? That question has been the basis of an ongoing debate kicked off by the revelation, five years ago, that much of James…
July 28, 2011
Ben Yagoda

The implications of plot lines in illness and memoir

Narrative therapy uses a client’s life story to shine a spotlight on how he understands his experience. The concept of an “illness narrative” emerged not in a literary context but over…
July 11, 2011
Victoria Costello
Death, truth and memoir: the debate over Joyce Carol Oates' "A Widow's Story"

Death, truth and memoir: the debate over Joyce Carol Oates’ "A Widow’s Story"

What is it that we really want from memoir? The kerfuffle this week over “A Widow’s Story,” a narrative from Joyce Carol Oates about the loss of her husband and…
February 17, 2011
Andrea Pitzer
Laurie Hertzel on growing up in newspapers and what she learned from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

Laurie Hertzel on growing up in newspapers and what she learned from the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

In "News to Me," Laurie Hertzel writes about life as an ink-stained wretch during nearly 20 years at the Duluth News Tribune. Now books editor at the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune,…
August 18, 2010
Andrea Pitzer
Mary Karr on truth: "the least of my problems as a memoirist, as a writer, is getting my facts right"

Mary Karr on truth: "the least of my problems as a memoirist, as a writer, is getting my facts right"

Author Mary Karr showed up Friday in Grapevine, Texas, in the middle of a thunderstorm to talk about telling the truth. The first keynote speaker at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction…
July 28, 2010
Andrea Pitzer

First Person Singular: It's not just about you

Getting stuck next to a compulsive talker is one of the worst things that can happen at a dinner party or on a long bus ride. Even worse: the self-centered…
June 28, 2006
Adam Hochschild