Writing Memoir Essays

“Giorgio’s compassion is memorable.” –KIRKUS REVIEW It wasn’t a typical response to depression. Reaching a new low in her life, Kathie Giorgio, a natural skeptic, decides to fight her sadness by publically posting one moment of happiness every day on Facebook. The response is overwhelming. People flock to her page to see each day’s new post. Soon, Kathie launches Today’s Moment Of Happiness Despite The News as her blog. She vows to continue this daily Today’s Moment for a year. And what a year! Her husband loses his job not once, but twice. Her autistic daughter is so ...

Finished writing your memoir? Get ready for EDITING, where your major work begins. This short guide covers everything you need to know to edit your book like a pro, and take your story and your writing from good to POWERFUL! POWER EDITING FOR MEMOIR WRITERS helps you look at every aspect of your writing—from your initial story concept, through the telling of your story, to how you craft your sentences. This short, concise, no-nonsense guide makes the editing process easy. It introduces you to a fantastically easy editing system, shows you how to use powerful word arrangements called “...

A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life by Pat Conroy is a new nonfiction collection of letters, interviews, and magazine articles spanning Conroy's long literary career, supplemented by touching pieces from the beloved author's many friends. The book collects some of Conroy's most charming pieces of short nonfiction, many of them addressed directly to his listeners, with his habitual greeting: "Hey, out there".

On the Water is a gorgeously written collection of essays that all take place on or near the water and pay tribute to the flora and fauna associated with those ecosystems. There are essays about the finer points of tickling rainbow trout in the streams of Normandy, and of eagles and ospreys fishing for bass while barely breaking the surface of the water. There are stories of droughts and floods, of dogs and boats, of worms and rattlesnakes, and even of catching and cooking soft-shell turtles that taste like osso-bucco.

Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung contains the wild and brilliant writings of Lester Bangs—the most outrageous and popular rock critic of the 1970s—edited and with an introduction by the reigning dean of rock critics, Greil Marcus.

Back when restaurant menus were still printed on paper, and wearing a mask—or not—was a decision made mostly on Halloween, David Sedaris spent his time doing normal things. As Happy-Go-Lucky opens, he is learning to shoot guns with his sister, visiting muddy flea markets in Serbia, buying gummy worms to feed to ants, and telling his nonagenarian father wheelchair jokes. But then the pandemic hits, and like so many others, he's stuck in lockdown, unable to tour and read for audiences, the part of his work he loves most.

Calvin Trillin has reported serious pieces across America for The New Yorker, covered the civil rights movement in the South for Time, and written comic verse for The Nation. But one of his favorite subjects over the years—a superb fit for his unique combination of reportage and humor—has been his own professional environment: the American press.

The essays in this collection are the work of a group of friends known as the Northwoods Essayists: The Write People. The name comes from a very special place where we first met each other, the Northwoods Unitarian Universalist Church in The Woodlands, Texas. The group began in 2020, and its membership has evolved over time. Our current members include Hallie Moore, Mira Dessy, Dorothy Kennedy, John Hammond, and Ann McAlpin. Our friend and fellow writer Sharon Ossowski passed away while this book was in progress. We know you’ll be delighted by her wonderful essays in this collection. Our ...

A portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last 50 years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of O’Brien’s own writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America. Glenn O’Brien collaborated with visual artists, writers, fashion houses, and musicians throughout his almost 50-year career. Intelligence for Dummies gathers Glenn O’Brien’s essays, aphorisms and tweets, to create a portrait of the artist as cultural bellwether.

Jack Kerouac’s archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Kerouac’s adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death.

“I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize, but rather for my journalism,” Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career - years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982.

Dear Diary, It Got Weird Again The Works of Mr. Joe This isn’t a diary. It’s a legacy stitched from the strange, the sincere, and the sentences that refused to stay quiet. Inside are fragments that became foundations—moments of insight, humor, heartbreak, and clarity gathered over years and held together by a single thread: the need to make meaning in a world that doesn’t always offer it freely. This collection speaks to those who feel everything a little too deeply, think a little too sideways, and laugh in the middle of their most serious questions. It’s for anyone who’s ever ...

Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years, the two writers did not meet until February 2008. Not long after, Auster received a letter from Coetzee, suggesting they begin exchanging letters on a regular basis and, “God willing, strike sparks off each other.” Here and Now is the result of that proposal: the epistolary dialogue between two great writers who became great friends. Over three years their letters touched on nearly every subject, from sports to fatherhood, film festivals to incest, philosophy to politics....

We will teach you how to write creative nonfiction in seven easy steps. This guide is designed to provide you with all the tools you need in a concise, easy-to-understand format that will answer all your burning questions and get you on your way to successful nonfiction writing.

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.

In 1935, Fred A. Birchmore left the small American town of Athens, Georgia, to continue his college studies in Europe. In his spare time, Birchmore toured the continent on a one-speed bike he called Bucephalus (after the name of Alexander the Great's horse). A born wanderer, Birchmore broadened his travels to include the British Isles and even the Mediterranean. After a lengthy, unplanned detour in Egypt, Birchmore put his studies on hold, pointed Bucephalus eastward, and just kept going.

"An utterly brilliant and wonderfully executed idea." –Jennifer Clarke (singer/songwriter) and Lenny Clarke (comedian/actor) Told from two different perspectives, The Cringe Chronicles is a unique father-daughter memoir following Kristin Tougias on her teenage tribulations and strange family vacations. Kristin’s father, author and travel writer Michael J. Tougias, is a bit eccentric and a true nonconformist who inadvertently adds to Kristin’s woes. At the end of each chapter chronicling their misadventures, Kristin’s father Michael gives his personal and humorous point of view, ...

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, ‘I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.’ This collection of 20 reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades tells the story of what happened next.

Filled with empathy and wisdom, instruction and inspiration, this book encourages us to reevaluate the codes and conventions that have shaped our assumptions about how fiction should be written, and also challenges us to apply its lessons to both what we read and how we read. The start of a more inclusive conversation about storytelling, Letters to a Writer of Color will be a touchstone for aspiring and working writers and for curious readers everywhere.

Los diarios de José Donoso han sido, por años, fuente de especulaciones y comentarios acerca de su carácter polémico y controversial. Este libro rescata una importante sección de esos diarios olvidados, y nos enfrenta como lectores a algunos de los secretos y obsesiones más profundos del gran narrador chileno.