Vote For the Worst Celebrity Memoir

July 27th, 2010

The Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com) is taking a poll to determine which celebrity has the worst memoir. If you’re not bored enough to participate in that poll or even read it, I will clue you into what the votes indicate thus far.

The poll offers a continuum of choices 1 through 10, with 1 being “not too bad” and 10 being “Awful!” At this point the books and ratings are, in order from the least bad to the most awful: Jane Fonda, My Life So Far, 3.8; Kim Catrall’s Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm, 5.4; George Hamilton, Don’t Mind If I Do, 5.4; Teri Hatcher, Burnt Toast and Other Philosophies of Life, 5.7; Rosie O’Donnell, Celebrity Detox, 5.7; Suzanne Somers, Knockout: Interviews With Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer, 5.8; Macauley Culkin, Junior, 6.4; Lauren Conrad, L.A. Candy, 6.5; Saddam Hussein, Be Gone Demons!, 6.9; Nicole Richie, The Truth About Diamonds, 6.9; Pamela Anderson, Star Struck: A Novel, 7.1; Naomi Campbell’s Swan, 7.3; Fabio’s Wild, 7.3; Victoria Beckham, Learning to Fly, 7.4; Larry the Cable Guy, Git-R-Done, 7.4; David Hasselhoff’s Making Waves, 7.5; Britney Spears, Heart to Heart, 7.8; Paris Hilton’s Confessions of an Heiress, 8.0; Tila Tequila’s Hooking Up With Tila Tequila, 8.1; Carrie Prejean’s Still Standing, 9.3; Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, 9.4.

Keep in mind that people who go to that website may lean more to the left than to the right politically. Now go back to writing your own memoir, and someday maybe it will get rated!

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Read This Online Autobiography to Study Memoir Style

July 20th, 2010

Many of you trying to write your memoirs may never have written anything of length before now. While you’ve probably read enough—both fiction and non-fiction—as you try to craft your own autobiography it can be helpful to read passages specifically of others’ life stories. If you can read them online at no charge, that makes it even easier for you.

A classic memoir, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, is a good place to start. Click here for the online version, which lets you pull up one chapter at a time. Certainly language has evolved since Ben Franklin’s time, so you won’t want to imitate the wording. But there’s an elegance to the way he writes that you can aspire to assume for your own work. Also, these chapters give you an idea of how to structure your memoir, which topics are important enough to cover, how to introduce dialogue and how candid to be as you describe your friends and relatives.

According to the website, Franklin’s is considered to be the most acclaimed autobiography to come out of colonial America. It covers his early life, travel, professional training, romantic encounters and all sorts of details of his days from his own perspective. Although Franklin lived to be 84 years old, he ends this account at age 51. This illustrates that you can create a compelling memoir by recording what you’ve accomplished so far before without necessarily waiting until you’re in your senior years.

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Lying or Laying? Learn to Tell the Difference When You Write Your Memoirs

July 13th, 2010

You don’t have to become an English professor to write a good memoir, but certainly some knowledge of grammar can’t hurt so that you avoid common slip-ups. The lie/lay confusion represents one of the most frequently made errors.

When people or things do the action on their own, use the word lie or, as a participle, lying: the cat just lies there in the sun; the book is lying on the table; the girl likes to lie on the sofa; I was lying on the beach one day. When someone or something causes the action to occur, use the word lay or the participle laying: she should lay down the law; I am laying the book on the table; he always lays a mat on the floor to keep people from tracking in mud.

The error on this is that people tend to use lay when they should use lie. The error rarely goes the reverse way. Once you get accustomed to using both words correctly, the usage will come easy to you. Part of the problem is that lay is used so often that the correct word lie doesn’t sound right to most people even when it is. These two words cause even more confusion in the past tense, which I’ll talk about next time. Now go back to writing your memoirs!

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Your Memoirs Can Document Property Ownership

July 6th, 2010

I spent part of the July 4 weekend at a friend’s summer home on property that has been in his family for four generations—five generations if you count his grown children. There’s the original house, a second house built by a sibling of the original homeowner plus my friend’s house, built by his grandparents and still owned by his mother.

It seemed that everyone there was “a cousin.” One of the cousins by marriage gave me the rundown on the ownership of each house and how the descendants are all related. It was really interesting. I saw that this summer property by a beautiful lake offered a way to keep family together. Even the fifth-generation cousins knew each other—and I suspect the little kids in attendance might have been sixth generation. Are you acquainted with cousins who are that far “removed”?

I wonder how many details of the ownership and activities that went on there for more than a century are forgotten by now. Even my own house was built in 1929 and had at least three owners before we bought it. I know a little about them, but some research could turn up interesting particulars. In your memoir, you might want to trace factual details like the lineage of property ownership. You may not think it’s that interesting to the reader or pertinent to your life, but your memoir provides a written record of information that otherwise may be forever lost to the ages.

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War Memoirs May Skew Details

June 29th, 2010

A fellow blogger lists nine topics he finds that authors exclude form their war memoirs. I won’t repeat the topics here; click through to his blog On Violence if you’re curious. But I will take issue with his claim that writers who avoid topics they think readers may find unpleasant or boring compromise the integrity of their book.

I distinguish between “the truth” and “the whole truth.” I don’t think that you, as the writer of the story that by definition you own, are obligated to mention every last detail of what’s going on in the setting of that story. Number five on the blogger’s list is civilian deaths. “An honest memoir,” the blogger writes, “will deal with this messy truth about any war.” I disagree. If you’re writing a non-fiction account of the war, then I believe you should include the facts surrounding civilian deaths. But in your memoir? The war is just one more player in your story. You can write about as much or as little of it as you like, even if it becomes such a main character that you’re really writing a war memoir.

I am all for rich detail in a memoir. But the On Violence blogger calls his nine points a litmus test that must be passed for him to respect a war memoir. While I support writing only the truth in your autobiography, I  disagree that you must include the whole truth for your story to be compelling.

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Use Description to Communicate Opinion in Your Memoirs

June 22nd, 2010

The whole point of writing a memoir is to tell the story of your life from your unique point of view. But, as with other types of writing, it can be most effective to let readers draw their own conclusions. This subtle difference lies in your style of description.

Let’s say you’re recalling how your met your childhood best friend. He was a teammate in Little League, but you didn’t know each other because you attended different schools. You could write: Tommy was a very good player, much more skilled than I was, so I was surprised when he seemed friendly to me right from the beginning. You’ve evaluated his ability, your ability and his friendliness, and you deliver to the reader no interesting details—just your conclusions.

Try it this way instead, more like a reporter: Tommy hit at least one home run every game, and as a short stop he could catch the wildest throws, then propel the ball like a bullet to the appropriate plate. I was thrilled to get on base at all, and out in center field I just prayed for pop flies to the infield. So I didn’t see it coming when Tommy patted me on the back after the first day of practice and challenged, “Race you to the Good Humor truck!” Readers still conclude that Tommy was friendly and the better player, but this style engages them and makes them want to continue reading your memoir!

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Keep Your Memoirs Free of Dangling Modifiers

June 15th, 2010

Today I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know. That old Groucho Marx joke perfectly illustrates what a dangling or misplaced modifier is. Many of you memoir writers have never written professionally or formally studied writing. To help you with your writing challenges, I promised this blog would address tricky grammar issues from time to time. So welcome to English class!

How could you rephrase Groucho’s statement to make it less ambiguous? Today, while still in my pajamas, I shot an elephant. That removes the ambiguity. While writing your memoirs, you might have a sentence like this: Not yet 10 years old, my parents’ divorce hit me hard. Do you see why that opening phrase dangles? The word you need after the comma must be “I” to explain who was not yet 10 years old. The way it’s written, the divorce is what’s 10 years old.

Here’s another example: Walking through the dirty puddles, our shorts were splashed with clumps of mud. That indicates that your shorts were walking through the puddles, when really you were the ones walking. To fix it, you’d say: Walking through the dirty puddles, we splashed clumps of mud on our shorts. Learning this rule will help you to make your memoirs clear for the reader. For more on misplaced modifiers, check this link at infoplease.com.

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Summertime Inspires Writers!

June 8th, 2010

You may be reading this from Australia, South America or some other southern hemisphere location, in which case you’re in the middle of winter. But I’m figuring that for most of you, June brings warm weather. The sun is shining and nature’s colors are popping in fruits, flowers and greenery. Summertime is a temptress, always beckoning you outdoors. When will you find time to work on your memoirs?

Early morning is wonderful during the summer months. I hope you have a window that you can open in the room where you write. With just a screen separating you from the entering breeze, you can write in solitude until you’re hungry or you need to be somewhere. The earlier you start, the quieter it will be. Perhaps you can hear birds waking up or the first sounds of a city coming back to life. Maybe the aroma of a bakery’s bread or a honeysuckle vine will find its way into your writing space.

Today’s sights, sounds and fragrances can remind you of what you saw, heard and smelled in an earlier time of your life. That will help you to create vibrant descriptions as you write your memoirs. Think about how an early morning was different for you 20 or 40 years ago. A rush of feeling can return when you let your senses be your guide.

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“American Idol” Connection Reported to be Contemplating Memoirs

June 1st, 2010

It’s always fun to see which celebrities are planning to write their memoirs. The latest, as reported by digitalspy.com, is Mezhgan Hussainy, whose fiancé is longtime “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell. Hussainy, 36, was the make-up artist on the set of the show when she started dating the notoriously contrary Cowell.

You might be wondering what a 36-year-old might find so compelling about her life that she already would want to pen an autobiography. Her famous boyfriend, known to closely guard the details of his private life, is not the major focus. Speculation is that Hussainy hopes to share the story of how she and her family fled Afghanistan 20 years ago and immigrated to America.

The digitalspy report quotes a source saying, “Mezhgan really is an amazing woman. She went through so much as a child but she remains full of optimism and positivity. She wants to get her story out in her own words to give hope to others.” At WriteMyMemoirs, we hear from some of our members who have similar experiences of escaping brutal lives either because of oppressive governments or abusive parents and caretakers. Like Hussainy, they want to get their story out there. Apparently traumatic experiences and wanting to help others are powerful motivators for writing memoirs.

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Another Website Offers a “Memoirs” Type of Catharsis

May 25th, 2010

Writing your memoirs can be a way to give yourself closure regarding an episode in your life and finally get something “off your chest.” When you do, are you directing any of that explanation to a specific person?

Yesterday, a column by Barbara Brotman in my hometown’s Chicago Tribune alerted readers to wouldhavesaid.com, a website that invites everyone to post anything they want to put out there, really. Some contributors write to someone who has died, to someone with whom they’ve lost contact or even to themselves or their “younger selves”; others express a thought they cannot bring themselves to say face-to-face to someone; still others write something they wish the world in general to know.

The contributors say that putting their long-held sentiments into words feels cathartic. As you write your memoirs, you may experience a similar catharsis when you picture various people reading your words. Perhaps you’ll express your regret about something you said or did, or you’ll want someone to see how life turned out for you. The writing process itself may bring you all sorts of surprises, relief and, of course, a sense of accomplishment. What I love about setting a goal to write your memoirs is that the benefit comes not only from the wonderful product you’ll have for your friends and relatives, but also from the process of remembering your life and recording it precisely as you want to present it. It just feels so good.

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