Born on third base, my daddy always said of the well off, and they think they hit a home run.
Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses respect for himse...
Whether you’re a memoirist or not, there’s a psychic cost for lopping yourself off from the past:
Your mother rolls her eyes at the cat lapping grapefruit juice, says, Everything that comes into this house is crazy - whether we choose them for that or they get that way, I don't know.
Your heart, Mary Karr, he'd say. His pen touched my sternum, and it felt for all the world like the point of a dull spear as he said, Your heart knows what your head don't. Or won't.
VI. Wisdom: The Voice of GodNinety percent of what’s wrong with youcould be cured with a hot bath,says God through the manhole covers,but you want magic, to winthe lottery you never bought a ticket fo...
Then it hits me. I’m actually kneeling before a toilet. The throne, as other drunks call it. How many drunken nights and slungover mornings did I worship at this altar, emptying myself of poison. And...
The shreiking fight or the out-of-character insult endures forever, while the daily sweetness dissolves like sugar in water.
The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. Mark Twain
The memoirist’s job is not to add explosive whammies on every page, but to help the average person come in.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every
The cans of bathroom cleaner they sold had faced the sun in their display pyramid for so long that their front labels had faded from lime green to pale lemon. The mouse-print instructions about not ea...
Real You is all you have, and all other paths are false. And in the best case, Real You is so happy to finally be recognized, it rewards you with Originality.
Novels have intricate plots, verse has musical forms, history and biography enjoy the sheen of objective truth. In memoir, one event follows another. Birth leads to puberty leads to sex. The books are...
Most kids bent their heads onto their notebooks and tried to sleep. One boy gauged the quality of his day by sleeping on graph paper, then drawing a circle around the drool spot he’d made and comparin...
It was a feminist act, revealing secrets in order to free herself and the women of her clan from the silence and obscurity to which a misogyny thousands of years old would have relegated them.
If you lie to your husband - even about something so banal as how much you drink - each lie is a brick in a wall going up between you, and when he tells you he loves you, it's deflected away.
I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest.
Every reporter who came up in legacy media can tell you about a come-to-Jesus moment when an editor put them up against a wall and tattooed a message deep into their skull: show respect for the fundam...
Every now and then we enter the presence of the numinous and deduce for an instant how we're formed, in what detail the force that infuses every petal might specifically run through us, wishing only t...