As a non-fiction writer with a really, really bad memory, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve read someone’s memoir and thought, with frustration and incredulity, How can they possibly remember all these details? Again and again, I’ve had readers of my work ask me for more: What were you wearing that night? What did you talk about with your best friend from high school? How did your body feel when they touched you? All I want to say in response is If I remembered, then I would have written about it.
Last year, during my MFA, I took a course where we read writing manuals and guides, and were asked to create our own. I created what I wish existed: a guide that worked with the gaps in memory, rather than trying to fill them in.
Within the pages of Partial Accounts: Writing the Gaps, I encourage you to play in the both/and, letting fiction and non-fiction, truth and imagination, slip into one another. Over the span of 45 pages, I share 8 different essays with writing exercises that have helped me remember details that I’ve felt called to recount, as well as practices that honor the gaps and holes that may exist in your own memory landscape.
As a non-fiction writer with a really, really bad memory, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve read someone’s memoir and thought, with frustration and incredulity, How can they possibly remember all these details? Again and again, I’ve had readers of my work ask me for more: What were you wearing that night? What did you talk about with your best friend from high school? How did your body feel when they touched you? All I want to say in response is If I remembered, then I would have written about it.
Last year, during my MFA, I took a course where we read writing manuals and guides, and were asked to create our own. I created what I wish existed: a guide that worked with the gaps in memory, rather than trying to fill them in.
Within the pages of Partial Accounts: Writing the Gaps, I encourage you to play in the both/and, letting fiction and non-fiction, truth and imagination, slip into one another. Over the span of 45 pages, I share 8 different essays with writing exercises that have helped me remember details that I’ve felt called to recount, as well as practices that honor the gaps and holes that may exist in your own memory landscape.
