memoir, biography

Authenticity & imagination in memoir

October 22, 2010 | 5 Comments

In an interview with Faye Rapoport DesPres in The Writer’s Chronicle (October/November 2010), Michael Steinberg, the founder of the journal Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and author of the memoir Still Pitching, ­discusses how successful memoirs and memoirists work. Steinberg exhaustively researched baseball, New York, and period histories of the 1950s for his memoir, but also used imagination as a tool to return himself to his lost boyhood. Some excerpts of Steinberg’s comments: Right now, creative nonfiction is a hotly …

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A novel on memory, story & alibi

October 13, 2010 | 4 Comments

A colleague here at Otterbein University, Noam Shpancer, a psychologist, has just hit the big time at age fifty-one with his first novel, The Good Psychologist. Early reviews are positive to raves: Kirkus gave it a starred notice, Alan Cheuse reviewed it on NPR, and the Boston Globe called it “extraordinary” and “a rare gift.” Bought by Henry Holt at an auction conducted by Noam’s agent, the story is about a therapist who’s treating a stripper with stage fright. And it’s about the …

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Interview: Daiva Markelis on memoir

October 8, 2010 | 8 Comments

Daiva Markelis, a professor at Eastern Illinois University who blogs at The Adventures of Mighty Bear Woman, answered some questions for Narrative about her memoir, White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life, reviewed in my last post. RSG: The first thing I noticed about your book was your easy, seemingly natural voice. Was finding this consistent, personal voice easy or difficult? DM: I belong to a writing group–the Eastern Illinois University Writer Babes; the babes are great at pointing out …

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Review: ‘White Field, Black Sheep’

October 4, 2010 | 5 Comments

White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life by Daiva Markelis. University of Chicago Press, 208 pages Daiva Markelis grew up in industrial Cicero, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, the first of two daughters born to a Lithuanian couple. Her parents had immigrated because of the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, and they yearned their whole lives to return. They were officially “Displaced Persons,” a category for European refugees who fled communism, although Markelis didn’t understand for many years her parents’ plight. The …

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Obama’s ‘Dreams from My Father’

September 30, 2010 | 4 Comments

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama. Three Rivers Press, 457 pages I’ve written about Barack Obama a couple times on this blog. In “Narrative Nation” I explored the meta-meaning of his presidential campaign; in “Behind the Barn” I told how my wife’s family’s barn in northwestern Ohio became one of only about three “Obama Barns” in the entire state. Now I’ve finally read Obama’s first book, his memoir, Dreams from My Father, and …

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Dinty W. Moore on essays, essaying & earning self-knowledge

September 24, 2010 | 13 Comments

Dinty W. Moore’s books include a popular spiritual inquiry, The Accidental Buddhist, and an award-winning, nontraditional “generational memoir,” Between Panic and Desire. His new book—his sixth—is Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (Writers Digest Books, 262 pages). “The personal essay is a gentle art,” he writes, “an idiosyncratic combination of the author’s discrete sensibilities and the endless possibilities of meaning and connection. The essay is graceful, wise, and always surprising. The essay invites extreme …

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Lucy Grealy’s ‘Autobiography of a Face’

September 19, 2010 | 8 Comments

“Part of the job of being human is to consistently underestimate our effect on other people . . .”—Lucy Grealy Lucy Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face, is an account of her childhood and young adulthood struggling with surgeries, treatments, and disfigurement from Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare cancer of the jaw. She conveys so well the aloneness of a sick child, at the mercy of hospital staff, and the effect of looking different from other people. Even when she wasn’t …

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