6/6/2023 0 Comments Poser by claire dederer![]() ![]() ![]() This week, Claire came for another class visit and once again she inspired me to think about memoir in a larger way, not just in terms of my own writing but in terms of the importance of the genre and in light of the question I often return to “Why memoir right now?” What cultural need is this genre filling? The first time she came to visit, she made the point that the biggest mistake memoirists fall into is confusing the events of the story with the essence of the book (that, in fact, the backbone of a memoir is the narrative arc of the narrator’s transformation, a statement I wrote about at length on Huffington Post and anywhere else I could get someone to listen. She inevitably gets the class worked into a froth with her smartypants talk about writing. Whenever Claire Dederer comes to visit my memoir class at the University of Washington, I remember the early excitement of being a new writer, of being hungry to write. ![]()
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