M. Suzanne Terry

I know I spent a whole post on food memoirs, which are my absolute favorite nonfiction books. But I also read/own a lot of other types of memoirs as well. I love hearing people’s stories. It’s one of the (only) things I miss about teaching public speaking. No matter what the assignment, if you give people a chance to share themselves, most of the time they will.

I like funny memoirs, family memoirs, travel memoirs, and cultural memoirs. I even like sports memoirs (particularly ones about running, it seems). A friend in my writing group once took my willingness to read just about any memoir as proof that I really will read anything. I understand her general sentiment – it feels good to read stories from people with lives and interests similar to your own – it’s comforting to know you’re not alone. But it’s also good to step outside of the inherently limited experience of one human life and learn how other people experience the world. That’s the real draw of memoir for me.

In a way, reading memoir is research (well, research-ish. Focused research is a lot more intense and intentional.). Writers are often admonished to write what we know, but even if you’ve lived the richest, fullest, most adventurous, long life, what you know firsthand is still just the information you can glean from one person’s experience. In the grand scheme of knowledge, that’s not a lot to go on. So if I’m going to write – about anything – why wouldn’t I want to know as much as possible about as many experiences and perspectives as possible? I need to hear other people’s stories to do that. For example, the main character in the novel I’m working on is dead but can see the effect his passing has on the ones he loves most. I know how I experience grief, but reading what others have gone through when a loved one died helps me understand my own characters in a way I could never get to on my own.

[Important aside – I am not a proponent of writers telling (and profiting from) other people’s stories, particularly when those people are perfectly capable of and actively telling those stories themselves (and inevitably doing a much better job of it). Even if a writer is going to write about another person who is no longer available to tell their story, they must do a hell of a lot of work and give credit (and even payment) where it’s due in order to write about them in an honorable way. Andi Cumbo-Floyd put in countless hours of piecing together genealogy records, researching local history, conducting interviews, and learning from those who write about slavery and racism before writing her young adult novels that delve into the subject, and as a result, her main character in the Steele series models this self-education process in a realistic way. Jennifer Koshatka Seman wrote Borderlands Curanderos, and her bibliography and research notes take up a solid third of the total pages of the book. That’s how you write about other people’s lives with integrity, and there’s no shortcut.]

Anyway…

A few memoirs I recommend (that I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet this month):

• Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi
• What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• From Scratch by Tembi Locke
• Travels With Charley by John Steinbeck
• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson
• Coming Clean by Seth Haines
• The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Hunger by Roxane Gay

Do you have any favorite memoirs?

I’ve spent October writing about books.