On Writing Well

Writers know more about themselves than any other subject, but they also generally avoid writing about themselves. Students think they have to write what their teachers want, and professional writers think they have to write what their editors want. But writing memoirs is liberating. When Zinsser convinced one of his journalist friends to try his hand at memoir, the man dug into his family history and reevaluated his own life. Zinsser argues that more writers ought to write about themselves, for themselves, so long as they don’t go overboard and become too egotistical. Like all writers, memoirists have to be sure that they only include useful details that push the narrative forward.

Zinsser says that he loves reading memoirs. Whereas autobiographies often try to cover too much ground, memoirs are powerful because they give a narrow window into a writer’s life. Good memoirists know how to give shape to their lives, and specific details are a must. For instance, Eudora Welty starts her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings by describing her childhood home’s various clocks and her father’s precise sense of time and weather. In A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin recounts observing the Sabbath with his family in Brooklyn through his sense of smell. In fact, Kazin is largely responsible for popularizing the personal memoir as a literary genre.

Like numerous other American writers, Kazin also used memoir to explore his unique identity as a minority and immigrant. Similarly, Enrique Hank Lopez writes about his relationship with Mexican identity after immigrating to the U.S. in “Back to Bachimba.” In her memoir The Woman Warrior, Chinese American writer Maxine Hong Kingston writes about her intense fear of speaking English in elementary school. Memoir can help the American public understand cultural differences, too. For instance, in “For My Indian Daughter,” Lewis P. Johnson discusses how he confronted and overcame his feeling of estrangement from his Native American ancestors.

Colorful characters are the key to good memoirs. For instance, in Clinging to the Wreckage, John Mortimer remembers how his blind father kept up his legal practice by asking his wife to read him salacious divorce cases out loud on the public train. But of course, memoirists have to be their own most interesting characters. In turn, memoirs can help others understand and accept themselves. For instance, Kenney Fraser writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s memoirs, journals, and letters to help deal with her own struggles as a middle-aged woman. Zinsser concludes that memoir lets authors turn their own lives into a gift for others.