![memoir essay memoir essay](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/writingasociologyessay-131010152637-phpapp01/95/slide-7-1024.jpg)
I always come back to Vivian Gornick on this point: “What happened to the writer is not what matters what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.” This deeper truth imbues the memoir with meaning as the author makes sense of her experience. (Memoir is not the story of your entire life-that would be autobiography.) This slice of life becomes the lens through which you tell a particular memoir story.Īt the heart of every memoir, beneath the surface story of events, is a deeper story truth.
![memoir essay memoir essay](https://www.essaycounter.com/wp-content/uploads/edd/2020/09/Food-Memoir.png)
Memoir is a sliver-or slice-of your life experience. Short-short memoir essays-those under 2,000 words but more commonly in the under 1,000-words range-go by the term “flash memoir,” or “flash creative nonfiction.” The “memoir essay,” to borrow a phrase Adam Gopnik uses in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2008, is an essay-length memoir, generally in the neighborhood of 2000 to 6000 words. Since that gathering back in the 1990s, short form narratives have proliferated, and the “short-short” story, known as flash fiction, has become increasingly popular. Without missing a beat, Hoffman replied, “Start short.” She explained that short stories provided an opportunity to practice craft on a scale more manageable and easier to sustain than the long-form demands of a novel. After her reading, a woman in the audience asked Hoffman what she recommended for an aspiring writer who had started several novels but hadn’t finished them. Years ago, when I lived in Boston and worked for The Horn Book Magazine, novelist and children’s author Alice Hoffman read her work at a local bookstore.