Advice — kathleen finneran

In many ways, we memoirists have it made. Our plots present themselves to us wholly realized; our characters come to us fully formed. By using our own lives as subject matter, we are spared the hard work of imagination that fiction writers must bring to their craft. You might say that we're already ahead of the game going in. If you were a writer fond of using sports metaphors, that is what you might say. We memoirists are already ahead of the game going in. We're like the junior league bowling team I was on in seventh grade. Because the...

I've never been good at telling the truth. From the time I first encountered stories as a child, I understood that they were meant to be manipulated, details added or deleted toward a desired result. I suspect the situation is the same for most memoirists. I suspect we have trouble with the unalterable truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and that we turn to memoir because it provides us with a legitimate way of lying. To supporters of memoir--writers and readers like myself, this may seem a shocking statement, a betrayal of sorts, ill-considered in its confession,...