I am off to Europe in just over a week, and so in lieu of sharing my own writing at the moment, I'd like to share this link to a provocative NYT opinion piece on "Social Nostalgia." Please enjoy and feel free to comment on how this relates to memoir here!
Beware Social Nostalgia by Stephanie Coontz
Monday, May 27, 2013
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
Le Guin, Again
Awhile back, I wrote a post that mentions Ursula K. Le Guin's relatively tight position on "truth" in memoir. She struggles with the increasing allowance granted to memoir writers, as a genre.
I struggle with her essay on it, because while I fundamentally agree with some of her ideas - we have to be careful about how much leeway we give ourselves when we don't actually remember things, etc - I think that memoir is changing, for good or at least for awhile, and getting more free in form - more lyrical, less narrative. If our forms of memoir are beginning to resemble poetry over prose, even if in paragraphs, then the permissable also shifts.
I struggle with her essay on it, because while I fundamentally agree with some of her ideas - we have to be careful about how much leeway we give ourselves when we don't actually remember things, etc - I think that memoir is changing, for good or at least for awhile, and getting more free in form - more lyrical, less narrative. If our forms of memoir are beginning to resemble poetry over prose, even if in paragraphs, then the permissable also shifts.
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