Melanie Brooks

"The worst story we can tell ourselves is that we are alone."

Melanie Brooks is trying to write a memoir about her father, who died of HIV due to an infected blood transfusion. Finding it difficult to approach a subject that was so personal and so painful, she began to seek out the wisdom of memoirists who had written about their own painful stories and shared them with the world. These interviews comprise the heart of this book, which unveils the process of juggling hard memories with the craft of writing a good story, how to tell one's personal truth, how to deal with the reactions afterward, and how sharing one's own specific story can connect with reader remind them and the author that they are not alone in their experiences after all.

For those wishing to start or continue writing a memoir, then this book might be a balm, a reminder that it can be done, providing insight into the processes of some masters of the craft.

For fans of memoirs, the book provides a backdoor look into how many of these amazing stories were written and the impact it had on the author's lives.

For me, this provided both while also increasing my TBR list, because dang if there's not a bunch of these memoirs that I need to read.… (más)

I really wanted to like this book, and there were things in it that were very likeable: interviews with a mix of well-known and virtually unknown (to me) memoirists meant that I discovered new memoirs I might want to read but also got insight into the back story of memoirs I've already read. The quality of the book varied with the quality of the interview, with some of the sections offering pretty interesting insights like that of Andre Dubus III: "what distinguishes decent writing from good writing and good writing from great writing is just how rigorous the writer was in his or her curiosity, just how authentic and sincere they were. In the A-plus books, the writer went to the bottom of the experience and what did he or she find? More bottomlessness. There are no answers, there are only questions."

On the down side, the interviewer/author's wide-eyed, incredulous demeanor is off-putting. She rarely offers anything beyond the interview itself. The tension that is supposed to animate the series of interviews and connect them together - her attempt to write her own "hard story" - ends up not being compelling enough and not integrated thoroughly enough, often relegated to a short paragraph at the end of the chapter.

Overall, this was an interesting idea carried out in a way that was too formulaic.… (más)