Tell the Story
In a comment to my post on Running with Scissors, Sam Beal opened the can of worms that waits near any conversation about memoir by asking: "So did it seem like 'fiction' the 2nd time around?" The answer is I'm afraid so, but I don't know whether Burroughs' book is fiction. Why does it seem […]
read moreWhat happened between the first time that I read Augusten Burroughs' Running With Scissors: A Memoir, when I admired its brave honesty and found it engaging and heart-rending, and this time, when I found it upsetting and somewhat annoying? Maybe I've read too many memoirs lately, and I wanted more than this one could give […]
read moreI read Lucy Grealy's Autobiography of a Face after Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty, so I was curious to see how they did memoir similarly or differently and how each writer treated their friendship. They do memoir and friendship so differently that Grealy's book barely mentions Iowa and doesn't mention Ann at all. Grealy's book […]
read moreIn Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, novelist Ann Patchett writes about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, a friendship that lasted from their meeting in 1985 at the Iowa Writers Workshop (although both were undergraduates at Sarah Lawrence, they were not friends there) until Grealy's death (ruled an accidental overdose) in 2002. More about Lucy Grealy […]
read moreI've been thrilled by the responses I've gotten for the last couple of weeks, so before I go on (sprinting through the second half of February to the finish) I want to take a second to thank readers and commenters and tweeters and bloggers. Everyone I'm going to thank is on Twitter, so I'll use […]
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For years I kept secrets in silence. Then, once upon a time, I spoke and wrote them to a handful of people and began to blog anonymously. Today I tell my stories face-to-face, online, and in a memoir coming soon. Telling our stories leads to freedom, empowerment, and growth, for both the teller and the told. Is today your once upon a time, your time to tell your story?
