INVENTING THE TRUTH: The Art and Craft of Memoir

by William--Ed. Zinsser ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 23, 1987

The anthologist of Extraordinary Lives repeats his formula in this collection of writers' reminiscences of how their books of memoir came into being. The art's as old as St. Augustine's Confessions, but the mechanics of the craft are less than exhaustively explored. According to contributor Annie Dillard's definition, a memoir is ""any account, usually in the first person, of events that happened a while ago."" Simple enough. But the real difficulty is aesthetic: what to put in? what to leave out? It is to various aspects of this formal crux that these five contributors, each the author of a noted book of memoirs, address themselves. New York Times columnist Russell Baker reveals the similarities--and critical differences--between autobiography and investigative journalism, as learned firsthand in the writing of his Growing Up. Toni Morrison, in ""The Site of Memory"" (a lovely lyric piece that forms the centerpiece of the collection), probing the boundaries between the traditionally nonfiction mode of memoir and her work in fiction like Song of Solomon, envisions the art of memoir as an excavation of buried life--an archeology of the interior. Alfred Kazin, recalling how he came to write A Walker in the City, traces his debt to two subgenres of memoir (the intellectual autobiography and the spiritual autobiography) whose masterpieces are The Education of Henry Adams and Walden. And finally, Lewis Thomas, the gentle poet of science, thinking back on the creation of his Lives of a Cell, delivers a coda of learnedly baroque meditation on time and cellular memory, so much contrapuntal cytology to Morrison's site-ology--natural philosophy at its best. An admirable idea for a book, filled with admirable ideas. It both salvages individual precious gems (these essays were originally presented as a series of lectures at the New York Public Library), and also brings us closer to the work of the memoirists themselves.

Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1987

ISBN: 0395901502

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987

Categories: NONFICTION