Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

"Maybe memoirs were Bad," wrote Dave Eggers in his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. "Maybe writing about actual events, in the first person, if not from Ireland and before you turned seventy, was Bad."

Our featured guest this week is Josh Kilmer-Purcell, author of I AM NOT MYSELF THESE DAYS), a man who actually built a community of writers to defend the memior.

Along with Hillary Carlip (who wrote QUEEN OF THE ODDBALLS), Maria Dahvana Headley (who wrote THE YEAR OF YES) and Danielle Trussoni (who wrote FALLING THROUGH THE EARTH), he has rallied hundreds of writers around the world to build the Memoirists Collective community

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog: 
So many people like to say things like, "Oh, so and so is too young to write a memoir" or "all memoirs are all fake." Why write a memoir now? How do you defend this art form against memoir-haters who have magically appeared over the last few years?

Josh Kilmer-Purcell:
Did somebody call me young? Who? When? I must send flowers. Continue reading...

 

All memoirs are, to an extent, fake. They're memory. And if anyone objects, I'd like them to write and tell me exactly what they ate for lunch fifteen years ago today. And what they were wearing. And who they were with.

Critics are fickle. They don't like memoir at the moment because it's popular. And critics are contrarians. If they weren't, there'd be no reason for them to exist.

Oprah and ilk hate memoirs because A Million Little Pieces wasn't quite as simplistic as she thought. When faced with an actual literary quandary, she reacted like a fundamentalist. Everything must be declared black or white, right or wrong, true or false.

Life doesn't work that way, and memoirs are lives. Perhaps that's why some people can't handle them.