Writers and Editors

Oct 06, 2014 3:56 PM EDT

I like this paragraph from Ann Patchett's afterword to Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face: “In the right hands, a memoir is the flecks of gold panned out of a great, muddy river. A memoir is those flecks melted down into a shapable liquid that can then be molded and hammered into a single bright band to be worn on a finger, something you could point to and say, “This? Oh, this is my life.” Everyone has a muddy river, but very few have the vision, patience, and talent to turn it into something so beautiful. This is why the writer matters, so that we can not only learn from her experience but find a way to shape our own. I’m not talking about shaping every life into a work of art. I’m talking about making our life into something we can understand, a portable object that contains the weight and power of an entire terrain.”

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Aug 22, 2017 8:18 AM EDT

See also The nature and malleability of memory as it affects stories and storytelling. More on the subject!

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Sep 21, 2017 7:54 AM EDT

Brain Pickings, Maria Popova's intelligent, probing newsletter, has presented several essays on memory, our sense of self, life, and the arts: • Permanent Present Tense: Pioneering Scientist Suzanne Corkin on How the Famous Amnesiac H.M. Illuminates the Paradoxes of Memory and the Self (8-10-17) “Even if we will never completely understand the way the brain works, whatever small part of the truth we are able to learn will bring us one step closer to understanding who we are.” • The Psychology of Why Creative Work Hinges on Memory and Connecting the Unrelated (9-2-14)“In the course of creative endeavors, artists and scientists join fragments of knowledge into a new unity of understanding.”• Virginia Woolf on the Nature of Memory and How It Threads Our Lives Together (9-26-16)“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither.”• The Mystery of Personal Identity: What Makes You and Your Childhood Self the Same Person Despite a Lifetime of Change (10-7-14)• Joan Didion on Keeping a Notebook (11-19-12) “We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.”• Hold Still: Sally Mann on the Treachery of Memory, the Dark Side of Photography, and the Elusive Locus of the Self (11-29-16) “Photographs economize the truth; they are always moments more or less illusorily abducted from time’s continuum.” • An Illustrated Meditation on Memory and Its Imperfections, Inspired by Borges (on Cecilia Ruiz, 7-22-15)• Ongoingness: Sarah Manguso on Time, Memory, Beginnings and Endings, and the True Measure of Aliveness (3-31-15) “Perhaps all anxiety might derive from a fixation on moments — an inability to accept life as ongoing.”

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