As a memoirist, I strive for veracity.
Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don’t.
I’m not nearly smart enough or imaginative enough to tackle the novel form. Never happen.
I do have a really good memory. I mean, like, I can remember all the phone numbers of everybody on the street I grew up on.
I tell people not to write too soon about their lives. Writing about yourself too young is loaded with psychological complexities.
I get about five memoirs per week in my mailbox, and few of them inspire anything but a desire to pick up the channel changer.
I think we fall in love and become adults and become citizens in a way by writing stories about ourselves.
When you do try to picture the boys who do ask you out, they’re absolutely featureless, like old carvings eroded by centuries of rain and wind.
When people suffer, their relationships usually suffer as well. Period. And we all suffer because, as the Buddha says, that’s the nature of being human and wanting stuff we don’t always get.
Nobody sounds good writing about your divorce, let’s face it.
He never gave up on me, I only stopped being matriculated.
Be willing to be a child and be the Lilliputian in the world of Gulliver.
I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world.
Mother’s particular devils had remained mysterious to me for decades. So had her past. Few born liars ever intentionally embark in truth’s direction, even those who believe that such a journey might axiomatically set them free.
Im always terrified when Im writing.
Love is the only passion which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.
It turned out to be impossible for me to ‘run away’ in the sense other American teenagers did. Any movement at all was taken for progress in my family.
Those are only rumors of suffering. Real suffering has a face and a smell. It lasts in the most intense form no matter what you drape over it. And it knows your name.
The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it’s physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.
I’ve never contended that I had a really horrible life.