Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties -- one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: 'This is what happened'; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened.
Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.
I didn't know how to weigh ideas about poetry. Nothing in the life I lived as a student - and later as wife and mother at the suburban edge of Dublin - suggested I had the wherewithal to do so. But I did have a unit of measurement. It was the measure of my own life.
A drawing is an autobiographical record of one's discovery of an event - either seen, remembered or imagined. A 'finished' work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
I read autobiographies because there is too much fiction in my life.
I think I'd be pretty easy to write for.
In the past, I'll admit, I've enjoyed being compared to the protagonists in my screenplays.
As a child, I disliked books in which children learned to be 'better' children.
One doesn't simply write about Lyndon Johnson. You get the Johnson treatment from beyond the grave - arm around you, nose to nose. I should admit that he also reminds me of my father, quite an overbearing and narcissistic character. And in some ways, he reminds me of myself. Another workaholic.
I like to draw from experiences in my past, but that alone is quite hard and complicated, because I don't want to say anything incriminating or too offensive, but I want to give people an insight into my life and how it was.
I have read all of Daniel Aaron's books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.
More and more I'm finding that I'm reading history, I'm reading biography, I'm reading autobiography for a sense of people who've been able to provide leadership. I don't read leadership books anymore.
People have told me that everything about me, every facet of my life, psyche, experiences, dreams, and fears, are laid out explicitly in my writing, that from the corpus of my work I can be absolutely and precisely inferred. This is true.
When I was younger, I was drawn to Ayn Rand books and other works of fiction celebrating individualism.
A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.
Autobiographies are only useful as the lives you read about and analyze may suggest to you something that you may find useful in your own journey through life.
You'll see that the strong, the affirmative, the positive voice in any of the plays I've written is that of a woman. My men are, well, not quite worthless, but they are certainly weak, and that reflects the reality I grew up with and what I think has in a sense shaped me.
I'm 25, so I've already gone through what my character Ged goes through, though it's on a general scale because I haven't studied at a wizard's school.
One of the things I have noticed about my novels is that they all concern people who can't quite bring themselves to tell the truth about their own lives... I've come to realise that this interest in damaged, untellable stories comes from my parents.
I like reading biographies because most of them are slightly similar, and it's voyeuristic, looking into someone's life.
I always wrote from a very young age, literally from the time I learned how to read and write.
I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.
In a way, 'Billy Elliot' was autobiographical. I can't dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature.
It's very difficult to be objective about yourself and your own circumstances, but one thing I do know about is that I grew up surrounded by storytellers.
[John Adams's] vividly descriptive prose is supremely quotable. Adams wears his heart on his sleeve and reveals all of his ambitions, doubts, and insecurities, especially in his diary, which is one of the greatest and most readable in all of American literature.
