I once heard Don DeLillo quip that a fiction writer starts with meaning and then manufactures events to represent it; a memoirist starts with events, then derives meaning from them.
No writer can impose his own standards onto any other, nor claim to speak for the whole genre.
His silence hadn’t been helplessness – it hadn’t even been love. It had been pity.
You can be a slave to current magazines or a slave to history.
I jerked huffing in air to holler, but the scream got stuck, just added itself onto the large round scream that all my life had been assembling in my chest.
To my mind, a small bit of catshit equals a catshit sandwich, unless I know where the catshit is and can eat around it.
They feed us the way the bread of communion does, with a nourishment that seems to form new flesh. According.
It’s hard to be an articulate ghost.
Why is it that everybody else is traffic?
Metaphorically speaking, I always make room for any evidence of scurvy in my characters, any mitigating ailments.
Together we read Keats’s letters to his lost beloved about how the stitches on a cap she made him went through him like a spear. I lace my fingers with his. The average non-poetry devotee may think the intensity around this stuff off-kilter at the least, but for us, it’s like digging our hands together into a secret vat of pearls. In that realm only we are rich as any royalty.
Maybe it fostered in me a creeping ambition-deficit disorder, but it could ease an ache. So anything worth doing could be undertaken later. Paint the apartment, write a book, quit booze, sure: tomorrow. Which.
Which ensures that life gets lived in miniature. In lieu of the large feelings – sorrow, fury, joy – I had their junior counterparts – anxiety, irritation, excitement. But.
Height – ours and our boyfriends – is a running contest between Lecia and me. If I tell her good news about myself, she’s liable to say ‘I’m five-nine’ and hang up.
Still, a living, breathing human being – even a boneheaded or barely articulate one – conveys so much in person. The physical fact of a creature with heart thrumming and neurons flickering – what Shakespeare called the ‘poor, bare, forked animal’ – compels us all; we’re all hardwired in moments of empathy to see ourselves in another.
But because of you, I couldn’t die and couldn’t monster myself, either. So you were the agent of my rescue – not a good job for somebody barely three feet tall. Blameless.
I’ve plumb forgot where I am for an instant, which is how a good lie should take you.
The goal of a voice is to speak not with objective authority but with subjective curiosity.
For the more haunted among us, only looking back at the past can permit it finally to become past.
The best memoirists stress the subjective nature of reportage. Doubt and wonder come to stand as part of the story.
In a great memoir, some aspect of the writer’s struggle for self often serves as the book’s organizing principle, and the narrator’s battle to become whole rages over the book’s trajectory.