Memoir WIP SURGERY!
Are you currently writing a memoir? Do you find your confidence hitting a brick wall? How best do I tell this story? Does anyone really care? What if I hurt loved ones? ...I might be able to help you!
Hello dear Subscribers!
In my ten years of teaching Memoir, I have come across many different questions and blockages among my students - Some frustrations might be around how best to write their story, why does their story matter? And how do we write about loved ones, particularly when they don’t want us to!
I write memoir - my debut memoir, Sins of My Father, was published to great acclaim, selected as The Guardian and The Spectator Nonfiction Book of the Year 2022, followed by INTO BEING, a part memoir, part book about how to write memoir, but also how it can transform a life in the process. I am now at the start of a third memoir, and have been thrown right back into the thick of it - moving through the dark woods of this process, trying to find the light to guide me. This is the experience, but I also feel strongly that those who write memoir need other people around them who are doing something similar, hence setting up this surgery!
It will be a monthly meet up on Zoom, and the first one will be on Wednesday 4th December at 6pm. It will be an hour long. What I would like to hear about from you is the kinds of things you are struggling with. Each session will be led by one question, and that question ideally will come from you. We will have time to discuss more than one question per session, with the aim that we’ll get a conversation going, and build up a community of likeminded people struggling through this extraordinary and sometimes painful process. But it will also be an education on style, technique, and a meditation on tips and advice on how we might write better.
If you are working on a memoir, I’d love you to join. All you need is to be a paid subscriber. Please add any of your thoughts or questions in the comments below and I will begin to put together a plan for the first session.
Hope to see you there.