HOW WE — EACH one of us — live our lives, is still as fascinating to me as it has always been. Having worked with many hundreds of people on their life stories, the courage,humour, determination, passion and endless dazzling variety of individual lives continue to inspire and nourish my own life.
While The Memoir Book is an extension of my guide to autobiographical writing, Writing Your Life: A Journey of Discovery, it is also designed to be used independently.The Memoir Book focuses on memoir and the related genres of travel writing and the personal essay; it refreshes, develops and expands writing skills and issues introduced in Writing Your Life; and it explores concerns occurring further into the writing journey.
There are twelve chapters, arranged as a course, but you can dip in and use the writing exercises in any order you please. The chapters are based on live memoir-writing workshops and are informed by hundreds of manuscripts critiqued for other writers, as well as drawing on my own writing experience. Each chapter, except the first, includes writing exercises and extracts from published memoirs.
All writers, even the most experienced, at times need reminders of fundamental writing practices to help them head in the right direction. Or, perhaps, to find a new direction. I hope this book will do both. To me, the test of a useful writing book is whether you put it down and start writing — so I hope you will read The Memoir Book, the whole lot or a chapter, then put it down and pick up your pen or sit at your computer, ready to write.