With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I'm writing an unauthorized autobiography.
Much of my publishing life was consumed by the memoirs of movie stars - or by attempts to get them to write a memoir.
I think writers of memoirs need to be respected for the bold decision they take to bare their lives open. That alone should be enough. The things I write about, if you notice, are sensitive issues for a lot of people. If I told you my age, they would get ideas. The next thing you know they'll be filing lawsuits against me.
I've written three books you could think of as memoirs.
Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.
Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.
I write nonfiction in this thriller-esque style. I have all the facts; I research it. I have thousands of pages of court documents... I try to get inside my stories.
A lot of presidential memoirs, they say, are dull and self-serving. I hope mine is interesting and self-serving.
I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.
I don't like memoirs. I think they're self-serving, and people use them to settle scores, and I really tried not to do that. You have to have a really interesting life to justify memoir, and my life has been pretty ho-hum.