Should You Memoir? "Are You Pat Nixon In China?"
"[T]here are good reasons to embark on a memoir: the world and the self collide in a particular way that only you, or mostly you, can narrate; you would like a preemptive grab at controlling the discourse. For instance: Are you Winston Churchill? Are you Nixon in China? Are you Pat Nixon in China? Did you compose Nixon in China? (Its composer, John Adams, has in fact written an engaging memoir.) Are you connected to a fascinating and underexplored chapter in history in any manner whatever? Are you a professional storyteller with a beautiful prose style and some autobiography begging for reportage? Are you a trenchant thinker with incisive analytical powers? Do you have a social cause you would like to advocate strenuously? And if none of the above, are you Brigitte Bardot?"
—"That many young people are already writing their memoirs is no longer a funny thing to say but an actual cultural condition."—Lorrie Moore
There's an old Vulcan proverb: Only Nixon could go to China.
That paragraph makes me forgive her for that Gateway/Stairs/whatever debacle. (And no I don't want to fight about it. I love her and hated it. The end.)
Start with a mememoir and see if it goes anywhere.
@osmium #GOES BACTERIAL
@osmium acciocosmos said: damn you wrote this on a blackberry!
"If I write that it happened, maybe it will."
I LOVE YOU, LORRIE MOORE.
I'm counting the days until I can wrap myself up in a cashmere throw, and curl up fireside with Meghan McCain's memoirs. It will be majestic and poetic, and I'll become her intellectual thrall dedicated to treading in the same luminous footsteps she has delicately left on this unworthy orb.
I think I left my memoir in a nightclub somewhere ten years ago and now I can't seem to remember anything that has happened to me.
As Martha Graham said: "There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open." So yea, just for the hell of it, write it.
All the fun goes out of this if you know that Brigitte Bardot supports outlawing head-scarves.
@toondeef But I think that some of the best memoirs have been written by unpleasant people with unpopular or wrongheaded beliefs. And beautiful hair.
@CousinOliver Once again Hillary-bashing rears its ugly head.