Panel: “How-To” Know-How: “Expert” Writing on Life Writing
Copanelists: Kylie Cardell and Leigh Gilmore
Recently a substantial subgenre of “how-to” books has developed: books written for people who wish to write their memoirs and for writers and would-be writers who want to try their hand at memoir—a newly evolving life-writing genre, according to Thomas Larson. Undergraduates and writing workshop participants, grandparents and adventurers with stories to tell, curious onlookers and Oprah fans—these comprise a diverse audience, most of whom are not scholars or theorists of autobiographical writing. Yet in writing nonfiction about their lives, they must negotiate the issues that theorists discuss: for example, truth value, the nature of memory, the representation of the subject—“I.” My larger project studies the extent to which how-to-write-memoir books have attended to and translated the critical discussions of these issues for novice writers; it examines the language the authors use to translate the memoirist’s practical experience with the genre into advice and insights for other practitioners.
This paper focuses on the use of the first person, especially the personal anecdote or autobiographical fragment, in four books about how to write memoir: Judith Barrington’s Writing the Memoir, Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, William Zinsser’s Writing about Your Life, and Thomas Larson’s The Memoir and the Memoirist. These authors utilize their background as journalists, essayists, memoirists, and teachers as they address would-be memoirists and ultimately issue commands as well as suggestions. In different ways and with varying degrees of success, I argue, these “how-to” writers use their own memoir fragments not only to develop ethos and provide examples, but also to translate ongoing discussions of such issues as memory, reliability, and subjectivity by passing them through a filter of experience. I explore the extent to which the personal anecdote tends to slant toward “lore” (a repetition of received wisdom about writing) and how some “how-to” writers resist this tendency.
Kathleen Boardman is Professor of English and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is co-editor, with Gioia Woods, of Western Subjects: Autobiographical Writing in the North American West (U of Utah P, 2004) and has recently contributed articles dealing with collaborative autobiography to the Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography (Greenwood, 2005) and Teaching Life Writing Texts (MLA, 2008).