The Memoir Project
Because when you have a flash of understanding on one topic, you can write an essay. Write an essay and you tackle a scene. Master the scene and you can write seventy-five of them and have yourself a book. And here’s an unexpected dividend: Write a book about an aspect of your life and you might gain perspective, since just as in living, success in writing is all about which details you choose to emphasize.
— Marion Roach Smith, The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life
I recently discovered Marion Roach Smith’s work teaching memoir and essay-writing on her website. I spent a lovely morning engrossed in her first chapter, and it’s crammed with insights, practical approaches, and vivid personal examples. It’s so dense with writing gems that I’ve practically flagged every other page — pausing each time to shake my head and say to myself “Damn, she’s really good.”.
In the last decade, I’ve taken plenty of writing classes and read lots of writing books, such as Stephen King’s On Writing, Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic. Somehow, Marion Roach Smith’s The Memoir Project had slipped through until now — for which I am mournful that so many years passed without her voice included in my creative arsenal. Perhaps it was best to wait until I was truly ready to dive in and do the writing work. Or perhaps her frank, straightforward approach to breaking down the memoir algorithm (“This is an (X) and the illustration is (Y)”) and her pragmatic, yet profound argument to mastering a personal essay (as quoted above) were exactly the keys — exactly the message — that I needed to receive. That this book can be the game-changer.
