Word: memoirist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...frank disclosure" is much more a Proustian exercise in creative recollection than a marshaling of the facts. After all, Peter is an imaginative soul, and he knows it--that's what got him into this mess in the first place. "When you are a seat-of-the-pants memoirist," he writes, "you don't write about your life; you live your memoirs. You begin to feel that you and your account of yourself are one, like a mythical beast...
...celebrity memoirist Roger Moore trips at the first hurdle. In the foreword to My Word Is My Bond, Moore promises to deliver "a fun book with no recycled scandal, tittle-tattle or dirtdishing." This seems to me to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding on Moore's part of the genre to which he is contributing. Fortunately for us Moore is not quite as good as his word...
...that expression is sometimes better applied to parents. Until recently the most egregious parental oversharing was usually your sister-in-law's Christmas letter or the guy with the endless stream of baby photos. But there's a new species of chatty dad and mom: the hipster parent-memoirist...
Lightning may not strike twice, but Bill Bryson, the serial memoirist, seems to have struck again with what appears to be recollections of his exciting 1950s childhood. The cover shows a well-worn and moth-eaten sweater with a yellow lightning bolt hanging on a clothesline. Does Bryson know that the “thunderbolt” is actually a lightning bolt? The cover is ambiguous in that regard, though as the author of “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” I suppose Bryson should know. Either way, it is funny to imagine the over...
...filtered through the author's memory and feelings and the inherently impressionistic nature of any literary medium. But before we get lost in an epistemological fog, let's not forget that there's a difference between unavoidable distortions and willful deceptions. Some falsehoods come with the territory of the memoirist; others must be deliberately imported into it. That's a distinction that memoirist Mary Karr, author of The Liars' Club and Cherry, is adamant about. "This is not rocket science," she says. "This is not like sexing a chicken. Is it fiction, is it nonfiction? I think the entire book...