The High Mountain Begging to be Climbed
Put your shoulder into shoving the memoir genre forward
An Exclusive Writing Lab about the awesome potential of memoir, on taking risks, on measures of success. Also, an announcement on the debut of Jennifer’s latest memoir. And a question for you, the writer of creative non-fiction: What are your dreams?
Hi and welcome into Flight School:
My own fifth memoir, The Summer of ‘72 will debut in a few days (look up at the topic bar on the site page and you’ll see I’ve been gearing up with graphic, layout, and so much more). I have my agent’s blessing for this decision that’s been in the works for several months.
Why?
Why would I, a New York Times bestselling writer, parse my book—chapter by chapter—on a web site? After ten hard years of work, tears, revision? Why not just sell it and get it published? What’s going on?
I intend to write posts and teach from the installments as I go along, and will discuss my reasoning over the course of Summer's release, but the most important reason for serializing right now has to do with this strange genre of memoir.
Partly what murders me about memoir—what I adore—is its democratic (some say ghetto-ass primitive), anybody-who’s-lived-can-write-one aspect.
~Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir
Memoir is an outlier. A shape shifter. An orphan. On one hand, beloved by readers. On the other, detested by purists and publishers.
There’s something breathtaking about memoir. It’s a high mountain that begs to be climbed. It’s also a path littered with disastrous, unreadable drafts. Sometimes a memoir will shoot upward, send off sparks, but we’ll read it thinking: Why? This book sucks. Other times, we’ll stumble across a relatively unknown memoir, read it and sob the whole time.
Bottomline, memoir challenges in ways that cannot quite be described. It changes you, the writer. When done well, it can blow the socks off a reader.
What is the secret to memoir?
What enables us, as writers in the form, to reach the heights?
What are the heights? Do we mean publication when we say that? Or do we mean the execution of craft?
Becky Ellis and I elaborate on these questions in the conversation below, which was live on Wednesday for our paid subscribers. In her memoir, Little Avalanches, she made it to the top of the mountain creatively. She did something in this book that changes the human heart. She didn’t do this with a clever “technique” or sleight of hand. She did it by mastering the basics: Scene, structure, plot. As a result, her book elevates the genre. That, to me, is what it’s all about.
More to come on The Summer of ‘72 (my own effort to elevate the genre), but for now here’s our expanded conversation. Please share your thoughts, hopes, dreams about memoir. What do you expect of yourself as a creator in this form?
To connect with Becky, click here. She’d love to hear from you.
Thanks for being with me this week. Looking forward to your thoughts,
Jennifer, 🐦⬛
Your question: What do you expect of yourself as a creator in this form?
Combing through my life to learn who, why, and where, I gathered archival letters and images, and wrote prose and poetry, assembing these artifacts to trace my internal life and my family's travels. I Must Have Wandered: an Adopted Air Force Daughter Recalls, is about quest and self-discovery, and at age seventy-two, a reflection. I've written several previous memoirs, three are small, like chapbooks, about the hemorrhagic stroke I survived at age fifty-seven. Another memoir is a collection of vignettes, previously published in literary journals. x T.U.