What Happens When You Disagree With a Chapter
A draft arrives and something is structurally wrong with it. That moment decides more about the project than anything before it.
Tag: Memoir
Articles on writing and publishing a memoir: where to start, structure, what to include, the legal and family risks, and why your life story is worth getting down.
MemoirBehind the Book: Behind the Wire
My grandfather survived the camps and wrote it down after the war. I was seventeen, hiding from the family, when he asked whether I wanted to know about it. The book then waited decades.
MemoirBehind the Book: Jake and the Bullies
A realistic novel about a kid harassed online has been written a thousand times and no seven-year-old finishes one. So Jake goes inside the internet, where trolls have caves and algorithms have addresses, and the villain is a machine that…
MemoirBehind the Book: Forty Worlds
This collection is reconnaissance. I intend to write a novel in every genre, and forty short stories across forty genres was a way of dipping a toe in each one before committing a year to any of them.
MemoirBehind the Book: The Dead Don’t Need Stuff
My father died with a one-bedroom apartment filled floor to ceiling and two full storage units, while being broke. I was three thousand miles away, so I told the apartment manager to donate all of it. Nobody objected, and nobody…
Career StoryThe IT Director Who Wrote 113+ Books
For 33 years I worked in enterprise technology, twenty of them running IT at Trader Joe's. Then I wrote 113+ books. Nobody predicts that line, and the pivot is the story. A crooked career is the book.
MemoirThe Parts of Writing a Book Nobody Warns You About
You will hate one chapter for no good reason. Somebody else will know your career better than you do. The hardest week is the one after the manuscript is finished.
DefamationThe Book I Turn Down
Some books I turn down in the first conversation. The revenge memoir has a sound: I am a victim, I am a victim, I am a victim. It fails on the page and in court, and sometimes a better book…
MemoirBehind the Book: My Life in Crazytown
I was diagnosed AuADHD at sixty-four, and the diagnosis is the reason this book exists. One of the answers it supplied was that the traits my family spent nineteen years trying to suppress were the traits keeping me alive in…
MemoirBehind the Book: The Mysterious Island
Gideon Spilett kept two sets of records on Lincoln Island, one for the New York Herald and one for himself. What he left out of the published account was the whole of Neb, and the reason was that an equal…
MemoirBehind the Book: The Relationship BULLSHIT Men Fall For
I wrote this for specific friends who could not work out why relationships kept going wrong. The credential behind it is not on the sales page: eight years photographing performers meant thousands of hours of unguarded conversation with women backstage,…
MemoirBehind the Book: The Itty Bitty Titty Committee
I wrote this alongside Gettin Laid, one from each side, to see what the difference looked like on the page instead of in an argument. The distinction turned out sharper than expected: the women learn about each other, and the…