Description:
Inside a pretty little box with a sepia-tone photograph of a manual typewriter on the cover is a compact journal with a sepia-tone photograph of crumpled paper on its cover and 60 smooth, oversize cards (yes, more sepia). The cards--labeled "remember," "discover," "dramatize," and "structure"--are meant to assist in your memoir writing. OK, so it's a gimmick. But it surely beats the many hokey, answer-the-questions amateur memoir guides out there, and even the serious memoirist will appreciate the substance beneath its sweet exterior. Taken by themselves, the "remember" cards are less than scintillating (most interesting among them: "Write about a strange family member" and "Write down a story that you tell people that didn't really happen the way you usually tell it"). Pair them with the other cards, however, and you'll soon be writing your memories as conversations among the people involved, or in the form of fairy tales. You'll be asking yourself whether there is a moral to your story, or a sense of drama. "You'll have to find tricks to fool yourself into telling truths you may not wish to reveal to yourself," says the author, Brian Bouldrey, but don't fret if you don't come up with anything deep and dark. "Everything is interesting," Flaubert is quoted as saying here, "if you look at it hard enough." --Jane Steinberg
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