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What makes writing a memoir difficult is harder to quantify. Is it learning to know when you're ready to talk about something? Is it seeing the structure in a lumpen mass of fact? Is it finding out what you were really like as other people saw you? Yes to each.

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

I will say, with memoir, you must be honest. You must be truthful.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

A memoir forces me to stop and remember carefully. It is an exercise in truth. In a memoir, I look at myself, my life, and the people I love the most in the mirror of the blank screen. In a memoir, feelings are more important than facts, and to write honestly, I have to confront my demons.

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

I'm not sure I ever would write a memoir.

In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in. It mustn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own.

I've always said the hardest aspect of the job of being a writer is writing.