Expansion of the Memoir Universe

Where else could you find Audre Lorde rubbing elbows with John McCain?

Everywhere I turn memoirs are falling out of the sky. Not that this is exactly a new phenomenon. In 1998, in his book Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, William Zinsser observed that the last decade of the twentieth century--a decade graced by the publication of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life, Mary Kerr's The Liar's Club and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life--was "the age of the memoir."

If Zinsser could claim then that "Never have personal narratives gushed so profusely from American soil as in the closing decade of the twentieth century," how much greater is that geyser of narrative now, facilitated as it is by the word processor, desktop publishing, CreateSpace, etc., etc., etc.

Killing My Darlings

By now, with the release of the new movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as the pre-Howl Allen Ginsberg, many of you will be familiar with the advice given to writers to "kill your darlings." You may even desire to know who really coined that phrase, meaning to cut all self-indulgent, superfluous, if masterful passages of your magnus opus during the revision stage. If so, read the article by Forrest Wickman in the online blog of the culture and current affairs magazine Slate for the short list of suspects. As for me, it is time to take that advice to heart.

It is round two of revisions on the memoir I am ghostwriting (though perhaps that phrase is not entirely accurate as my client has told me he intends to credit my labors in the "as told to" category). If anything, getting my name on the tome only heightens my anxiety at this stage to make a decent showing.