January 2011
11 posts
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“Occasionally I have used my experiences with my daughter as a window into a...”
– Gee, I guess people like to read about about other people’s experiences? Could Neil Genzlinger be a frustrated memoirist? That might explain some things.
http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/g/neil_genzlinger/index.html
too many Daves: Suggested edits for "The Problem... →
hannahmiet:
davidquigg:
A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.
There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences…
After all the angry rants, tweets and mind-screams I devolved to in...
"Why does there have to be a problem with memoir?"
Oh - by the by, circa 1997 (yeah, I’m old) I went to a PEN panel discussion called “The Problem With Memoir.” Frank McCourt, Kathryn Harrison and some others were on it. McCourt opened by saying something like, “Excuse me, but why does there have to be a ‘problem with memoir’? Does there have to be a problem? I don’t see a problem.”
So this is an...
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No, YOU shut up
In the coming Sunday New York Times book review, Neil Genzlinger uses the occasion of reviewing four memoirs to trash the whole genre and call upon would-be memoirists to just STFU and go do something else.
This kind of wholesale dismissal of first-person writing - calling it solipsistic, boring and too easy - is itself such a solipsistic, boring and too-easy position. As in, I don’t like...
“Pussy Fever” Loves “Locker 29” - The Rumpus.net →
Antonia Crane and Cheryl Strayed have the most eye-opening, though-provoking discussion about sex work and feminism up on The Rumpus today. It stemmed from their opposing views on that subject in essays they each wrote for the brilliant Rumpus Women Volume 1: Personal Essays by Women.
I have been working with a ghostwriting client who is a former sex worker, and this conversation will definitely...
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