Today’s prompt is inspired by a talk Ianthe Brautigan gave on March 5, 2001. Memoir is a journey. Just because it’s your life, don’t think you know the end. A beeper could go off and change everything. Life is like a box of chocolates . . . you don’t know what you got until you bite into it. Sometimes your life makes sense after you write and digest your findings. Ianthe suggests writing a memoir in an unusual way, not “this happened and then that happened.” To start: Write excerpts from your past. Write your stories. Don’t worry about where they will go. Tell your story as if sitting around a campfire. If you need inspiration: Make a collage from magazine articles/photos about what you want to write about. Look at these when you need a nudge to write. Once you start writing, let go of how you should write….
Tag: Imperfect Endings
Story of A Reluctant Memoirist
Guest Blogger Zoe FitzGerald Carter, author of Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Story of Love, Loss, and Letting Go (Simon & Schuster), writes about being a reluctant memoirist. I never intended to write a memoir. As a reader, I’ve always preferred fiction to non-fiction and my book, Imperfect Endings, which is about my mother’s decision to end her life after struggling with Parkinson’s for many years, started off as a novel. I wanted to write a fictionalized account of my experience growing up as the youngest of three girls and explore how it felt to have two powerful older sisters fighting over my soul. My idea was to create a crisis in my characters’ lives as adults and then show how the old alliances and animosities from their childhood were re-ignited by this “current” event. At the time, I was struggling to make sense of my mother’s suicide and I thought,…