Word: memoirists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...even some of the more modest predictions about Jacob Zuma's rise to power had been correct, South Africa would be an empty, corrupt dictatorship by now. Back in 2006, South African memoirist Rian Malan ended his dismal assessment of the nation's prospects ("Not civil war, but sad decay") in British magazine the Spectator by asking: "Anyone want a house here?" A year ago, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu said he was "deeply saddened" when Zuma staged a party coup against his predecessor Thabo Mbeki, "deeply disturbed" that both had used institutions of state in their struggle and warned that...
...read an interview from 2006 in which you said you felt like you were done writing about your own life. Oh, you know us memoirists. All we do is lie. I hate saying it, because it's going to sound awful: "Memoirist Says Writing 'Cathartic.' " But it is. I definitely want to write novels, but I seem to have to continue to process these other events. My next book is not a novel, but it's also not a memoir. It's a very different book...
After interviewing the memoirist extensively, talking to family members, scrutinizing television appearances and mining speeches or other documents, a ghostwriter with the need for speed may enlist transcribers and fact checkers to expedite the process. But in the end, how quickly the book gets finished depends largely on the ghostwriter's drive to grind it out. "My friends used to joke about, I think it's Control plus F10 - [the computer shortcut that brings up] the word count," says Barbara Feinman Todd, who ghostwrote Hillary Clinton's 1996 best seller, It Takes a Village, among other books. Jenkins, meanwhile, recalls...
There are memoirists like Child who write about what made them famous, or infamous. There are unremarkable people who write about a remarkable thing that happened to them. And there is the 21st century memoirist, who makes him- or herself interesting in order to write about it, usually through a time-centric gimmick, like spending a few months at, say, an ashram. Powell belongs to this last category, and cannily the movie lets us see how the wheels turn in her head. Ephron includes Child's real-life reaction to Powell's blog and lets it stand; she doesn...
...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...