Two quotes today, both from Thomas Larson’s wonderful book The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading & Writing Personal Narrative:
“It feels natural to see the remembered self as a character who has an independent life, chooses for himself, indulges free will. But memoirists avoid such self-casting. The memoir writer does not situate himself in a recreated world as though he were a literary character. What the memoirist does is connect the past self to–and within–the present writer as the means of getting at the truth of his identity.”
“For such emotionally intense memoirs we need emotionally revealing memoirists, authors who are willing to put themselves on the couch, under the lamp, into the darkness, sometimes as they are living or soon after they have lived the emotional mire they are working with and, perhaps, waking up in.”
