The August issue of O magazine offers “O’s Memoir Feast,” eight “riveting true stories” introduced with these words:
Tell me a story. Tell me your story. … Okay, talk to me, tell me who you really are. This is what we feel when we sit down to read a memoir. We have a craving for connection, an urge to share a confidence. We want an insider’s glimpse of someone else’s life. … some contemporary memoirists such as Kathryn Harrison, Geoffrey Wolff, and Augusten Burroughs have bared startling family secrets, but a memoir can as often be a story carved from a quiet, ordinary life: a personal history reconstructed from memory and infused with meaning…
Both the print and online versions of O also offer the article “How to Write Your Own Memoir,” by Abigail Thomas, including these 10 “exercises to get you started:”
- Write two pages of something you can’t deny.
- Write two pages of what got left behind.
- Write two pages of something you wrote or did that you no longer understand.
- Write two pages of apologizing for something you didn’t do.
- Write two pages about a physical characteristic you are proud to have inherited or passed on.
- Write two pages of what you had to have.
- Write two pages of humiliating exposure.
- Write two pages about a time when you felt compassion unexpectedly.
- Write two pages of what you have too much of.
- Write two pages of when you knew you were in trouble.