A Quote by Lidia Yuknavitch
I get kind of tired of the "But it's your life!" attitude about memoir. I wrote. I engaged in artistic production. I made a piece of art. Why the preciousness or mystical unicorns around "memoir"? I'm curious how you feel about it just now.
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I'm not into this memoir craze that's been going on for 20 years now and doesn't seem to ever let up. People just indiscriminately say "memoir" now when it's a person writing about their own life.
On a spectrum of literary productions, memoir is just another form. If the person doing the reviewing or critiquing was ill-educated about literary forms, they could write something dunderheaded about the author or their life (I've seen these and barfed at them), but anyone who is well-practiced and educated in literature - why would they leave that at the door when entering memoir?
I would be so mad if I saw something called a memoir, and then it was Mike Birbiglia. It would be so infuriating. It's like, 'Who is this guy, and why does he have a memoir?' David Letterman could write a memoir. Joan Rivers could. I'm just a nobody. I'm a comedian and a writer.
To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.
I didn't write the memoir with any sort of intention of feeling better. I wrote the memoir because I had a weird need to write a good story. But once I was done, I did feel better about myself. Not better, just calmer. Because a tremendous onus had been lifted off my day-to-day.
I can be very snobby about fiction, especially contemporary fiction. I can be kind of overly demanding, I think. But this is, I think, a good time. A lot of fiction comes out right now. So, I like reading the memoir. I love memoir, the biography, auto bio.
A lot of my songs are very personal, always, but this one felt like a memoir. I almost called it Hallucinated Memoir. "Granny" is a hallucinated memoir. It's straight-up symbolism for my life, in many ways.
A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.
I would never do a printed memoir. I've been asked to publish a memoir from years by different publishers and literary agents. I think it wouldn't be great for me because all I'd really want to talk about it music and I'd rather just play it.
After I wrote my memoir, 'A Long Way Gone,' I was a bit exhausted. I didn't want to write another memoir; I felt that it might not be sane for one to speak about himself for many, many, many years in a row. At the same time, I felt the story of 'Radiance of Tomorrow' pulling at me because of the first book.
I don't think you can take a whole genre of very popular books and say, "This is all trash!" When we read a memoir that isn't by a celebrity, we feel like we're about to go on a journey and we don't know where the journey will lead. But when we read a memoir by a celebrity we feel like we already know the journey and we just want to travel it.
I'm a memoir writer. I try to understand the world by taking experiences I have and making them into a story, whether it's a narrative memoir, blogging for The Huffington Post, writing poems, or talking on the screen about what has happened to me and how that relates to the world at large.
If you can propose a memoir, even if you are eighteen years old - and what do you remember? What are you memeing? If you can propose a memoir, I believe someone will pay you to write it. And you will get a contract for nonfiction. And if it is about victimology in one way or another than you'll get more money. It's a sensation.
I've been thinking a lot about why it was so important to me to do The Idiot as a novel, and not a memoir. One reason is the great love of novels that I keep droning on about. I've always loved reading novels. I've wanted to write novels since I was little. I started my first novel when I was seven.I don't have the same connection to memoir or nonfiction or essays. Writing nonfiction makes me feel a little bit as if I'm producing a product I don't consume - it's a really alienating feeling.
Right now in American writing there is no genre as exciting as memoir - the writer can do anything, as long as it works. It's like the 1920s up in this joint. So, I'd say, experiment with how you tell the story. In the best memoir it's not the what, it's how the writer tells the what - meaning and effect through form.
There are so many stories that need to be told and are not being told. We tend to want to put things in boxes: "This is a memoir about a Muslim," or "This is a memoir about a woman or a normal personal." There's a certain story that assumes to be universal. Everyone else is ethnic fiction. Anyone can aspire to universality.
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