Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful help for any autobiographical writer
Review: I am reading this book for the third time, very slowly, practicing as I go. I had been 'stuck' for years, unable to make sense of my personal stories, until I came across Rainer's wonderful sourcebook. It's given me the answers I needed: how to decide what to keep and what to leave out, how to weave it all together, how to remember the emotional truth, how to choose the details that make it real. I am finally writing my stories with "Your Life as Story" as guide and encouragement.[As for a previous reviewer's criticism that Rainer didn't know that Cinderella's mother died, not her father -- they both died in the story I read. There are many versions of the old fairy tails, and they all have something important to tell us.]
Rating: 
Summary: Facts and Fairy Tales
Review: I completed a one day seminar with Ms. Rainer. Throughout the course of the seminar she continued to assume that it was Cinderella's father who had died, not her mother. This rather substantially thwarts some of Rainer's basic assertions. At the conclusion of the seminar, some participants noted that in the version of Cinderella we knew, it was C'smother who had died. Rainer appeared shocked. Perhaps she should avoid fairy tale lives as a paradigm for "real lives."
Rating:
Summary: Extremely thorough and useful book!
Review: I concur with most of the customers reviewing this book, it deserves all 5 stars. Whether you're a professional writer seeking to write/publish a memoir, or a private individual who wants help putting together a personal life story or family history, this book is immediately useful, inspiring, and educational. It's packed to the brim with information but it's very easy to read and digest at the same time. I found the writing exercises to be insightful and very helpful in pinpointing pivotal events and tightening the scope of the particular stories I wanted to get on paper. I truly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: I was a student of Tristine Rainer's in the Master of Professional Writing Program and this book helped me tremendously when I cut my teeth on autobiography/memoir---not my own, by the way. I co-wrote it with Sir Rupert A.L. Perrin, M.D., and ORDINARY MIRACLES will be published by PublishAmerica in 2004. Thanks, Tristine!
Rating:
Summary: Student Still Has Rave Reviews
Review: I was a student of Tristine Rainer's in the Master of Professional Writing Program and this book helped me tremendously when I cut my teeth on autobiography/memoir---not my own, by the way. I co-wrote it with Sir Rupert A.L. Perrin, M.D., and ORDINARY MIRACLES will be published by PublishAmerica in 2004. Thanks, Tristine!
Rating:
Summary: A great gift to writers interested in telling their story
Review: I wrote a memoir about my 15 years as a homebirth midwife in Berkeley, CA. The hardest part for me was putting myself into the book - in other words, turning it from a series of childbirth tales into a memoir. Once I discovered Tristine Rainer's wonderful book, I could understand how to do it. The author, with an extremely useful set of exercises, teaches how to use past struggles in one's life, discover the meaning within them, and capture them into prose that is worthy of contemplation and expression.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: Most writing books are like diet books, they make miracle promises and as you read, you believe that your success is going to be so easy. Then you put the book down and the next day realise it has given you zero practical guidance.
Tristine Rainer's book is geared, as the title says, to those who wish to write autobiography. However, this book would be equally invaluable to anyone who wants to write fiction inspired from life. She tackles a lot of thorny issues that I have rarely seen covered at all by the other writing books I own - and believe me I have quite a collection! Some of these issues include how best to handle the passage of time - THE single most difficult thing I've been grappling with in my own writing - as well as knowing what to leave out of your story, the ethical dilemmas of writing about family and friends, the pain of telling the truth on the page and last but not least, story structure.
Now story structure has been flogged to death by every writing manual, most notably Robert McKee and all those other Joseph Campbell story-as-myth screenwriting formula bores. Rainer takes this one giant leap further by providing a nine-step questionnaire about your story themes and your own life story, its pivotal moments, that magically turns into a story outline. I'm not kidding, this one ingredient of the book makes it worth the money in itself.
Finally, the author has a funny, engaging writing style, peppered with brave anecdotes about her own life misadventures and an extremely useful range of examples from autobiographers throghout history including Hemingway, Anais Nin and Simone de Beauvoir plus a whole raft of others that I had never come across but will now be reading.
Trust me, you need this book!
Rating:
Summary: Highly readable, full of useful tips for memoirists.
Review: Rainer has done it again -- captured the current trend in autobiographical writing and added depth and inspiration. In her former book, The New Diary, she gave tips and examples for journal keepers. Here, she captures the memoir wave and tells how to write your life story with a novelist's grace and style. Guaranteed to give you fresh ideas and motivation to get on with your own reminiscences.
Rating:
Summary: invaluable resource to writers of memoir or autobiography
Review: This book does an excellent job of prodding one to dig deeper, asking pointed questions and directed short exercises to get you thinking. In writing my memoir, I had a hard time going beyond the surface events and revealing myself. This book asked me just the questions I needed to consider to remove my focus from events and to look at my inner emotions and conflicts. Reading the book and doing the exercises provided throughout results in a very helpful compilation of thoughts and structure that can give shape to a story.
I found the book's style to be sometimes overly chatty, especially at the beginning. But despite the fluff, all of the meat is in there, providing very useful tools to writers seeking to make a compelling story from their life experiences.
Take your time to go through this book slowly, doing the exercises in order. It took me several months. But at the end, I had a vision, an outline, and some very useful first draft material. I was finally on my way to putting together a manuscript. Follow Rainier's instructions and it will happen.
Rating:
Summary: This seems to me an important and useful book
Review: This seems to me an important and useful book. I have read its table of contents, the first five pages, and all the reviews posted on Amazon. From looking at the Table of Contents I have the clear feeling that the author has considered many of the major problems involved in the writing of autobiography. She too it seems to me has opened up for many people a way of making their own lives and experience more meaningful. If she can help as I sense she already has , people who wish to reflect on their past, and make some sense of it, do so, then her work is a blessing.
As I understand it many many people would be helped by being able to write the story of their lives. I know several who have done this just for their own families and find it meaningful.
I would however disagree with one thing I read in the few pages of the book I did read. I do not believe all life - stories should confine themselves to what they are to a small closed circle. There are lives, perhaps the exception, who touch upon many others, and whose meaning connects with greater publics and worlds. The great autobiographies from Augustine on down have this element of connecting with wider worlds and themes.
In the Hasidic Jewish tradition it is taught that the life of a great teacher, the story of a human being truly devoted to living and teaching the word of God, becomes itself a Holy Book, a Sefer Torah.
Perhaps it would be helpful for all of us to look for those times of blessing in our lives, and write about them.
|
