“We read to know we’re not alone.”
-William Nicholson

Creative Writing – Memoir Prompts – Day 15 of 21

The best writers are first readers. To hone our craft, we need to read those who have mastered it.

Today
Write for 20-30 minutes about the books you’ve loved — biographies, memoirs, fiction — anything you remember picking up and not wanting to put down. If you have a specific memory about a biography, perhaps you remember feeling as you read about these fascinating lives that you wanted to accomplish something worth writing about too.

MEMOIR EXAMPLES

“If you’re looking to lose yourself in a book, the following memoir examples are great places to begin:

“The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicles Joan Didion’s year of mourning her husband’s death, is certainly one of the most powerful books on grief. Written in two short months, Didion’s prose is urgent yet lucid, compelling from the first page to the last. A few years later, the writer would publish Blue Nights, another devastating account of grief, only this time she would be mourning her daughter.

“Patti Smith’s Just Kids is a classic coming-of-age memoir that follows the author’s move to New York and her romance and friendship with the artist Robert Maplethorpe. In its pages, Smith captures the energy of downtown New York in the late sixties and seventies effortlessly.

“When Breath Becomes Air begins when Paul Kalanithi, a young neurosurgeon, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Exquisite and poignant, this memoir grapples with some of the most difficult human experiences, including fatherhood, mortality, and the search for meaning.

“A memoir of relationship abuse, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House is candid and innovative in form. Machado writes about thorny and turbulent subjects with clarity, even wit. While intensely personal, In the Dream House is also one of the most insightful pieces of cultural criticism.

“Twenty-five years after leaving for Canada, Michael Ondaatje returns to his native Sri Lanka to sort out his family’s past. The result is Running in the Family, the writer’s dazzling attempt to reconstruct fragments of experiences and family legends into a portrait of his parents’ and grandparents’ lives. (Importantly, Running in the Family was sold to readers as a fictional memoir; its explicit acknowledgment of fictionalization prevented it from encountering the kind of backlash that James Frey would receive for fabricating key facts in A Million Little Pieces, which he had sold as a memoir.)

“Of the many memoirs published in recent years, Tara Westover’s Educated is perhaps one of the most internationally recognized. A story about the struggle for self-determination, Educated recounts the writer’s childhood in a survivalist family and her subsequent attempts to make a life for herself. All in all, powerful, thought-provoking, and nearly impossible to put down.

“While book-length memoirs are engaging reads, the prospect of writing a whole book can be intimidating. Fortunately, there are plenty of short, essay-length memoir examples that are just as compelling.”

SHORT MEMOIR EXAMPLES

‘“The Book of My Life” offers a portrait of a professor that the writer, Aleksandar Hemon, once had as a child in communist Sarajevo. This memoir was collected into Hemon’s The Book of My Lives, a collection of essays about the writer’s personal history in wartime Yugoslavia and subsequent move to the US.

‘“The first time I cheated on my husband, my mother had been dead for exactly one week.” So begins Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life,” an essay that the writer eventually expanded into the best-selling memoir, Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

‘In “What We Hunger For,” Roxane Gay weaves personal experience and a discussion of The Hunger Games into a powerful meditation on strength, trauma, and hope. “What We Hunger For” can also be found in Gay’s essay collection, Bad Feminist.

‘A humorous memoir structured around David Sedaris and his family’s memories of pets, “The Youth in Asia” is ultimately a story about grief, mortality, and loss. This essay is excerpted from the memoir “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” and a recorded version can be found here.‘

Writers.com: How to Write a Memoir

​BONUS: Gratitude Journal
Day 15
Name 1-15 biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, or any books you’ve read and loved; or list any 1-15 reasons you are grateful today.