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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
A memoir takes some particular threads, some incidents, some experience from a person's life and gives an account of it.
The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.
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.
Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical.
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.
Really, as a writer, I believe that if you're going to write about your own life, you need to do it as honestly and candidly as you are capable.
I'm not sure I ever would write a memoir.
I have written a memoir here and there, and that takes its own form of selfishness and courage. However, generally speaking, I have no interest in writing about my own life or intruding in the privacy of those around me.
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.
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