Saturday, January 11, 2020

Naked Truth: How to write a Memoir

God doesn't promise an easy journey, just a safe place to land . . . 

Leaving Communist Czechoslovakia is not like leaving any other country. It is more like leaving another universe. I will never truly be free of its gravity, no matter how far I journey. .. You learn to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, you write, blog, link  


Into every sunny life rain and snow must fall - I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.


“I’m learning persistence and the closing of doors, the way the seasons come and go as I keep walking on these roads, back and forth, to find myself in new time zones, new arms with new phrases and new goals. And it hurts to become, hurts to find out about the poverty and gaps, the widow and the leavers. It hurts to accept that it hurts and it hurts to learn how easy it is for people to not need other people. Or how easy it is to need other people but that you can never build a home in someone’s arms because they will let go one day and you must build your own.”
― Charlotte Eriksson, Another Vagabond Lost To Love: Berlin Stories on Leaving & Arriving


Each of us is a book waiting to be written, and that book, if written, results in a person explained.”
― Thomas M. Cirignano, The Constant Outsider



Kylo Ren's fractured helmet and the Japanese art of kintsugi (broken pottery repair with visible "scars"). "The idea is to treat the breakage of the piece as a part of its history, instead of something to hide."


From memoir and self-care books to comic novels, writing about our flaws and imperfections has never been so popular. But can failing ever be a success, asks Lindsay Baker?