“However, narrating what you remember, telling it to someone, does something else. The more a person recalls a memory, the more they change it. Each time they put it into language, it shifts. The more you describe a memory, the more likely it is that you are making a story that fits your life, resolves the past, creates a fiction you can live with. It’s what writers do. Once you open your mouth, you are moving away from the truth of things. According to neuroscience. The safest memories are locked in the brains of people who can’t remember. Their memories remain the closest replica of actual events. Underwater. Forever.” TruthMemoirStorytelling Book:The Chronology of Water Source: The Chronology of Water
“Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.” ArtReasonFormWaterFictionIssuesStylePaintingElementsStrategyStructureMemoirCraftsNonfictionCompositionFormalPreciseCritiqueChronology Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“Memoirs have at their heart a content that "happened" to someone in real life. Is that what you are itching at in your question, so that if you are a reviewer or you are writing a critique you might feel as if you are stepping on someone's actual face?” IfsFeelsWritingHeartRealMightFacesLife IsHappenedReal LifeMemoirCritiqueReviewersItching Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“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?” IfsWritingWellsPersonsFormLiteratureDoorsIllProductionsMemoirEducatedEnteringSpectrum Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“Fiction and poetry expose intimate things from a person's life every bit as much as memoir does, and sometimes more. I don't quite see or live the distinction you are making about the forms.” PersonsDoeSometimesFormBitsFictionMemoirIntimateDistinction Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“One thing about humans is that we all have them - lifestories. We live by and through them. But writers of memoir are particularly good at bringing literary strategies and form to experience (at least the good ones are).” HumansFormOne ThingStrategyMemoirLive By Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“The WRITER of memoir gets incoming weirdness in very odd ways. I was recently talking to a memoir writer whose work just went meteoric - but some of the comments and communications and gestures she gets in the wake of that success are stunningly and atrociously over-personal, as if suddenly people feel like they know her and her life intimately, and have permission to transgress all her "life" boundaries.” PeopleIfsKnowsWayFeelsTalkingCommunicationBoundariesMemoirOddCommentGesturesPermissionWeirdness Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“To a certain extent that happens with all kinds of successful writers and artists and celebrities, but there is also something about the form of memoir that creates an eerie reader space of intimacy that is only "real" in the space of the text.” KindRealHappensFormArtistCertainSpaceSuccessfulReaderMemoirAll KindsIntimacyEerie Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“The memoir as a somewhat indistinct form is absolutely true. So many of the memoirs I've read, and the ones I have gravitated toward most, somehow upend what I expect from memoir and the project seems greater than just the exposition of a life.” SeemsFormGreaterProjectsMemoir Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“As far as being territorial about one's own life, that's a mistake for ANY writer. All writers everywhere, in every genre, are drawing from their life and the lives of those around them for "material." Memoirs just make transparent and even amplify that activity.” MistakeMaterialsActivityDrawingMemoirGenreTransparentAmplifyTerritorial Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“The best memoirs - like This Boy's Life, or Crazy Brave [by Joy Harjo], for instance - bring you through a private river of storytelling that joins a major ocean of human struggle and joy. The act of enunciation - the forms and strategies of storytelling - are every bit as literarily serious as they are in poetry or other prose forms.” HumansFormJoyBitsBoysStruggleCrazySeriousOceanMajorsRiversStrategyBraveMemoirStorytellingInstanceProse Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“I look for the moment(s) in the story where the writer risked abandoning the glory of the self in favor of the possible relationship with an other. I don't ever let the market tell me what a memoir is. The first best memoir I ever read was Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.” FirstsLooksSelfMomentsStoriesGloryFavorsMemoirGrassWaltLeaves Of Grass Author: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.” FeelsKindArtMadeAttitudePiecesTiredProductionsMemoirCuriousArtisticEngagedMysticalHow You FeelUnicornLife Attitude Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
