Everyone has a story worth saving, and most people wait too long to write it down. These posts are for anyone who wants to write a memoir — where to start, how to structure a life into a book, formats to choose from, and why the time to capture your story is now, before the witnesses are gone.
HealingWriting a memoir can wear you down physically and emotionally, even decades after the events. A client who had to stop three chapters in, my own experience, and how to protect yourself.
Book ProposalDecades of experience only become a readable memoir with structure. How to choose an organizing principle, decide what stays, and shape raw memory into a book someone wants to read.
Book ReviewsMick Foley's wrestling memoir became a bestseller because he wrote it himself, longhand, refusing the ghostwriter the publisher offered. The decision shaped everything: his voice, his digressions, his willingness to report hard truths without softening them. It's the clearest proof…
AgingI have interviewed a great many people past retirement for books. Almost all of them apologized for not being interesting enough. They were wrong every single time.
Book ReviewsBillybeat Island was a bed in a Camden bedroom with five boys in it, and the floor was lava. Gerry Mecca's memoir runs from there to a Texas state championship his team won and he did not.
HistoryPinellas County is full of people who did something substantial somewhere else and then moved here, and almost none of them have written it down. The reasons are always the same three, and all three are wrong.
Memoir WritingFailed memoirs know what they cover, not what they are about. Coverage is the events. Aboutness is the question the book answers, the meaning under the events
GriefI spent almost twenty years unable to write about my marriage to Claudia. The book only worked once I stopped telling it and let Buttercup, our cat, tell it instead.
FamilyFather's Day is the third Sunday in June. When the relationship was hard, the holiday is complicated. Writing the honest version instead of the card version.
Book ReviewsA landmark memoir of living with bipolar disorder, written by a clinical psychologist who is herself one of the world's leading experts on the illness she has. That rare double perspective, patient and authority, makes it uniquely valuable: candid, beautifully…
Authority Through AuthorshipSkilled trades hold knowledge that does not move through textbooks, certifications, or YouTube, the kind that takes thirty years of apprenticeship to build and dies in a single generation when the master retires silent. Here are ten trades, master electricians,…
Authority Through AuthorshipVeterinarians hold an authority almost no other profession does, because they are the last person in the room when an animal dies and the first on call when one is sick. The right book is not a pet-care manual; it…
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