#memoir

Doing a geographic” is a term alcoholics often use for acting on the impulse to start over by moving to a new town, or state, instead of making any internal changes. It’s the anywhere-but-here part of the disease that says, “Remove yourself from this, go someplace new, and everything will be better.” Two years into our Florida stint, my mother pulled a geographic as radical as the move from Rochester. The new plan was to head for California. She enrolled in the mathematics graduate program at the University of California’s shiny new campus in San Diego, and as soon as our elementary school let out for the summer, she put us into a new Buick station wagon – a gift from her parents – and drove us across the country. You’d think we’d have protested at yet another move. After all, having been duped before, we were in no position to believe that the next move would be any different. But I have no memory of being unhappy about the news. Because that’s what often happens when an alcoholic parent is doing a geographic. She pulls you in and, before you know it, you, too, believe in the promise of the new place. ↗

— Katie Hafner

#mothers-and-daughters #change

If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line. ↗

— Baby Halder

#bengali #india #memoir #women #women-writers

Although my understanding of exactly how much trouble I was in grew more specific over time, as a child I surely understood enough about my condition to know it was something I'd better keep private. By intuition I was certain that the thing I knew to be true was something others would find both impossible and hilarious. My conviction, by the way, had nothing to do with a desire to be feminine, but it had everything to do with being female. Which is an odd believe for a person born male. It certainly had nothing to do with whether I was attracted to girls or boys. This last point was the one that, years later, would most frequently elude people, including the overeducated smarty-pants who constituted much of my inner circle. But being gay or lesbian is about sexual orientation. Being transgedered is about identity. ↗

— Jennifer Finney Boylan

#memoir #trans #life

All of this made me feel better about myself, and I was grateful to the books for teaching me-without my even having to read them- that there were people in the world more desperate, more self-absorbed, more boring than I was. - about memoirs ↗

— Brock Clarke

#england

You have to get lost before you can be found. ↗

— Jeff Rasley

#biography #charity #himalayas #memoir #mountaineering

Memoir today is like one big game of misery poker: The more outlandish, outrageous, or just plain out-there the recounted life, the more likely the book is to attract the attention of reviewers, talk-show bookers, and, ultimately, the public. ↗

— Ben Yagoda

#life

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. ↗

— Anthony Powell

#biography #cannot #case #circumstance #conceivable

I would never write a memoir, because it would be too boring. ↗

— Harlan Coben

#boring #i #memoir #never #too

It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim ↗

— Jason Najum

#culture-critique #essay #humor #inspirational #memoir

I have always distrusted memoir. I tend to write my memoirs through my fiction. It's easier to get to the truth by not claiming that you are speaking it. Some things can be said in fiction that can never be said in memoir. ↗

— Armistead Maupin

#claiming #distrusted #easier #fiction #get