Carol Ascher, my friend and neighbor in Sharon, Connecticut, has written in the genres of fiction and memoir, and she answers my questions about the differences between them.

You've written a memoir about your father and two novels with a father figure? Why did you use non-fiction and fiction when writing about this topic?

My father was so important to who I am as an intellectual, aesthetic, and political individual, and since our relationship ended in a violent break shortly before he died, I've written about him three times.

The first time was in The Flood, about a ten-year-old girl in a refugee family in Kansas in 1951, an "autobiographical novel,"  Read More 

As my memory drives me deeper into the past, my mind circles around and into it, making discoveries and bringing insights and ideas back to the pages of my manuscript, and I experience little epiphanies. My memory seems like a bottomless well, as I again and again pull up fragments of feelings, and then the events that evoked them. Memory seems like a muscle that strengths with practice.

"The past is inside us in flickering and mysterious ways that can never be fully acknowledged nor easily represented," editors Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow have written in the introduction to The Feminist Memoir Project. Reading the fascinating anthology aroused many of my own memories from living in New York during the early years of the Women's Liberation Movement.

It was then when I began to write Portrait of an Artist, my biography of Georgia O'Keeffe. I was in my thirties and had more questions than answers about how to live, and I learned a lot from examining her life.

Despite the demands of almost daily writing, I find in my seventies that my efforts to write an evocative memoir are more meaningful than writing another biography. As I go through my journals, the writing forces me to face the meaning of events that eluded me earlier. And if it's unsettling at times, I believe that writing a late life memoir is more rewarding.  Read More 

In last week's Jottings post I wrote about the important of memory when writing memoir. Another way writing a biography differs from writing a memoir is vicariously living another life or vividly living his or her own.

The demand of researching and writing a biography--which goes on for years at a time--has made me feel I had abandoned by own. When working on my biography of Georgia O'Keeffe, I sometimes felt envious of her adventures in the Southwest, while I sat at my desk day after day in Manhattan.

In contrast, writing a memoir is a way to live your own life again. "I suppose I write memoir because of the radiance of the past," Patricia Hampl has written in I Could Tell You Stories. "To write one's life is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the personality as it seeks its narrative form."

As I read my old journals and work on my memoir, I initially experience events in the past the way I did at the time. Then on reflection I often begin to understand them as little differently, enlarging what I felt or thought then with the insights of maturity and the perspective of time. Memoir writing enlivens the present and gives it depth.

Do other memoirists experience this?  Read More