Sentimentality is only emotion you haven’t proven to the reader—emotion without vivid evidence.
Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world.
Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings—sorrow, fury, joy—I had their junior counterparts—anxiety, irritation, excitement. But
Unless you’re a doubter and a worrier, a nail-biter, an apologizer, a rethinker, then memoir may not be your playpen. That’s the quality I’ve found most consistently in those life-story writers I’ve m...
There's a space at the bottom of an exhale, a little hitch between taking in and letting out that's a perfect zero you can go into. There's a rest point between the heart muscle's close and open - an...
The editor self thinks only of saving the reader time and shaping a powerful emotional experience.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain
Sure the world breeds monsters, but kindness grows just as wild, elsewise every raped baby would grow up to raped.
Patti proposes that I pray to accept whatever reality I’m in, staying alert for practical solutions rather than issuing orders in prayer. It takes discipline to stop beseeching the heavens for wheelba...
Memoir done right is an art, a made thing. It’s not just raw reportage flung splat on the page.
I’ve said it’s hard. Here’s how hard: everybody I know who wades deep enough into memory’s waters drowns a little. Between chapters of Stop-Time, Frank Conroy stayed drunk for weeks. Two hours after C...
It takes an obsessive streak that borders on lunacy to go rummaging around in the past as memoirists are wont to do, particularly a fragmented or incendiary past, in which facts are sparse and stories...
It sometimes seems to me like we’re not supposed to notice that Shug’s colored, or that saying anything about it would be bad manners. That puzzles me because Shug’s being colored strikes me as real o...
I exhale a highway of smoke and stare down it, then say, Each day has just been survival, just getting through, standing it.Don’t you see how savage that sounds? Like, that’s the way men in prison yar...
I ALMOST FELT A WEIRD POWER OVER MOTHER DURING SUCH TIME. SHE HAD A HOLD ON ME, AT LEAST. AND HER GRIP FELT LIKE SHE WOULD HANG ON NO MATTER WHAT I YANKED HER THROUGH. BY THIS TIME IT WAS HURRICANE SE...
He was so proud that she had more going on north of her neck than her hairdo.
Finally, put it aside. Put it out of your head at least a week. You want it to set up like jello. And when you pick it back up, ask yourself, What haven’t I said? How might someone else involved have...
Effortless, excellence has to be. Tossed off, reflecting the ease you're born to, which opposes what little I've garnered about comportment. I'm bred for farm work, and for such folk, the only A's you...
As for the actual validity of the notion [of] an immovable self, ever-firm, you're there only by half, at best...You'll spend decades trying to will 'same self' into being. But you'll keep shape-shift...
Was behind in every conceivable way. So the old attack dog started howling through my head as I’d