In class, Claire talked about how we as writers of memoir share our own vulnerabilities and put ourselves outside of our own comfort zones so that our readers might find comfort in our experiences, referencing Lisa Jones, author of the memoir Broken: A Love Story, who describes the role of the memoirist like this, “You’re simply a nice carpenter who has helped make a shelter for other people’s uneasiness by exposing your own.”Īfter class a few of us were talking about the fear we experience before we share or publish a piece that reveals something particularly personal when Claire made the point that reading memoir allows us to see our own lives in a new way, particularly the aspects of our lives that happen behind closed doors. 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.

Poser by claire dederer