The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative
- ISBN-10
- 080401101X
- ISBN-13
- 9780804011013
- Category
- Biography & Autobiography
- Pages
- 211
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2007
- Publisher
- Swallow Press
- Author
- Thomas Larson
Description
The memoir is the most popular and expressive literary form of our time. Writers embrace the memoir and readers devour it, propelling many memoirs by relative unknowns to the top of the best-seller list. Writing programs challenge authors to disclose themselves in personal narrative. Memoir and personal narrative urge writers to face the intimacies of the self and ask what is true. In The Memoir and the Memoirist, critic and memoirist Thomas Larson explores the craft and purpose of writing this new form. Larson guides the reader from the autobiography and the personal essay to the memoir—a genre focused on a particularly emotional relationship in the author’s past, an intimate story concerned more with who is remembering, and why, than with what is remembered. The Memoir and the Memoirist touches on the nuances of memory, of finding and telling the truth, and of disclosing one’s deepest self. It explores the craft and purpose of personal narrative by looking in detail at more than a dozen examples by writers such as Mary Karr, Frank McCourt, Dave Eggers, Elizabeth Wurtzel, Mark Doty, Nuala O’Faolain, Rick Bragg, and Joseph Lelyveld to show what they reveal about themselves. Larson also opens up his own writing and that of his students to demonstrate the hidden mechanics of the writing process. For both the interested reader of memoir and the writer wrestling with the craft, The Memoir and the Memoirist provides guidance and insight into the many facets of this provocative and popular art form.
Get the book
Other editions
-
- 2007-05-15
- 232 pages
- Ebook
- Ohio University Press
-
- 2007
- 211 pages
- Paperback
- Ohio University Press
Similar books
-
Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature
By Meredith MaranSpeaking frankly about issues ranging from turning oneself into an authentic, compelling character to exposing hard truths, these outstanding authors disclose what keeps them going, what gets in their way, and what they love most—and ...
-
The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease
By Thomas LarsonIn The Sanctuary of Illness, Thomas Larson (The Memoir and the Memoirist; The Saddest Music Ever Written) gives a powerful and personal inside tour of what happens when our arteries fail.
-
The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again
By Sven BirkertsThe Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism.
-
Spirituality and the Writer: A Personal Inquiry
By Thomas Larsonfaithful and Langston's family besiege him, the last straggler, to get up. They pray for him “in a mighty wail of moans and voices.” And, though he feels he wants to receive the Lord, nothing happens. He waits again.
-
Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family
By Joy CastroThis volume navigates the emotional and literary minefields that any writer of family stories or secrets must travel when depicting private lives for public consumption.
-
Fictions of Femininity: Literary Inventions of Gender in Japanese Court Women's Memoirs
By Edith SarraThis book represents an exciting new stage in studies of classical Japanese literature, as scholars turn from the translation with brief introduction to studies that are the products of application of literary theory and original critical ...
-
The Truth of Memoir: How to Write about Yourself and Others with Honesty, Emotion, and Integrity
By Kerry Cohen"Kerry Cohen's The Truth of Memoir is a smart, soulful, psychologically astute guide to first-person writing. She reveals everything you want to know--but were afraid to ask--about telling your life story.
-
The Art of Memoir
By Mary KarrIn The Art of Memoir, master memoirist Mary Karr synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black-belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art ...
-
Repossessing the World: Reading Memoirs by Contemporary Women
By Helen M. BussRepossessing the World is the first book-length critical inquiry into women’s use of a form that has often been dismissed as less important than autobiography, less professional than the novel, and less intellectual than the formal essay.
-
Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children, and Womanhood
By Christa ParravaniLoved and Wanted is the passionate story of a woman’s love for her children, and a poignant and bracing look at the difficult choices women in America are forced to make every day, in a nation where policies and a cultural war on women ...