It was a thrill to hear from a Texas journalist that Word for Word "is an adventure that I never knew I needed as a writer." And then to read that the memoir is "especially recommended reading for any and all aspiring writers," in the Midwest Book Review.

 

I wrote the memoir for myself but also with other writers in mind, mostly younger women writers grappling with the same difficult conflicts as mine, like the one between writing and mothering.

 

Women agents, women editors, and women friends advised, encouraged, and mentored me as a writer, so it's gratifying to know that the ups and downs of my writing life have meaning for younger women like Kidron Tirey, the journalist in Texas.

The first sentence of Word for Word has been chosen for the "First Lines" column in the June 2021 issue of Publishers Weekly. It goes: "This is a memoir about living a writing life--wanting to be a writer, becoming a writer, and being a writer--as acts of self-expression, self-assertion, and womanly survival."

 

If you've read Word for Word and liked it, please review it on Amazon or Goodreads or somewhere else. You don't have to be a writer to do it! 

It was important to me to write a memoir as a way to look back and make sense of the past. When it was time to publish Word for Word, it was a moment of truth. Did I dare go public with what I remembered? Good, bad, and indifferent?

       

"The wish to tell one's story may be stronger than the anxiety of exposure, but not by much," Daphne Merkin has written. "Memoirists...risk being judged not only on the quality of their prose but on the content of their character."

 

Over a period of time, like other memoirists I gradually found a way to turn my caution into a kind of writerly courage.  

 

With warm regards,
Laurie 

 

News About Word for Word:

• Publisher's Weekly's BookLife named Word for Word an Editor's Pick for its "outstanding quality."
• Publishing consultant Jane Friedman posted on her popular blog an excerpt from the last chapter of Word for Word
• An interview by Thomas Hill of Vassar College for the Library Cafe
• An interview by Marshall Miles of WHDD Radio
• An interview by Gretchen Hackmeister of the Hotchkiss Library of Sharon

Buy from Amazon

Perhaps the most problematic part about writing a memoir is writing about others, dead and alive. Especially alive.

 

What to do? You can drop names and change names. You can express yourself extremely carefully. You can be absolutely sure of your facts. You can get liability insurance.

 

The problem is usually more daunting at the beginning than at the end of writing a memoir.

What I and other memoirists often discover while working on draft after draft is that anger gradually softens through more insight and turns into something else. Like compassion.

 

With warm regards,
Laurie

                                   

I spotted this cartoon -- a little yellowed and faded from being on my bulletin board -- in The New Yorker a year or so ago.  It expresses the fear that friends and family may feel when someone announces they're writing a memoir. Happily, my husband Robert was never worried.

 

      Now that another April has exploded in Connecticut--bursting blossoms and greening the landscape--I'm reminded again of the amazing power of nature.

      Rachel Carlson credited biophilia (loving nature) and hortophilia (tending nature) to health and healing.

      And Oliver Sachs discovered that nature had a restorative effect on the brains of his patients often "more powerful than any medication."

      When I moved to the country after a divorce and began to garden, it was so joyful and transformative that I eventually wrote Four Tenths of an Acre, a book that looks at life through the green glasses of a gardener.

      "Working the soil brings me back to my own nature, and I now understand that tending a garden is the same as taking care of myself," I wrote.

      "The rituals of gardening give a rhythm, even a rapture to living, apart from the routines of writing and the ebbs and flows of relationships."

     When a box of advance reading copies of Word for Word: A Writer's Life arrived recently, I felt a little trepidation about sending out the books before remembering others' attitudes toward reviews.

     Centuries ago, an English duchess, Margaret Cavendish, hoped that people would not think her "vain" for writing a memoir; it might not be important to them, she admitted, "but it is to the Authoress, because I write it for my own sake, not theirs."

     Georgia O'Keeffe was also defiant about reviews: "I make up my own mind about it—how good or bad or how indifferent it is. After that, critics can write what they please. I have already worked it out for myself, so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free."

 

     I'm neither indifferent like the duchess nor defiant like O'Keeffe. While working on my memoir was a little like writing a long letter to myself, I hope that what I learned might be meaningful to others.

 

     Before long, there were some very nice responses, including:

 

     "Word for Word is a beautifully told story about the growth of a woman writer…whose intellectual and spiritual debts are to women writers, feminism, and, more generally, to strong women…" Carol Ascher, author of Afterimages: A Family Memoir

 .

     "In fluid, evocative prose that is at once personal and political, Laurie Lisle turns her biographer's eye on her own life with a clear-eyed, honest gaze that probes, delights, and illuminates." Jennifer Browdy, author of The Elemental Journey of Purposeful Memoir.
 

      Writers cherish words, and I've saved my own and the words of others sent to me in letters throughout my life.

     

   When I decided to write a memoir, I went to look for my forty or so journals. 

     

      "I gathered them together, numbered them, and arranged them on a bookshelf--from the college spiral notebooks to the more recent hardback Moleskine volumes--and then opened the fragile first page of the 1963 journal," as I explained in Word for Word: A Writer's Life.  

     

     They helped me remember and then write the memoir.   

 

     The image above is a photo of the journals along with a teenage diary with a lock and a cartoon character on the cover saying "my year... and how I shot it."

 

     I took the journals with me everywhere. They're now a bit battered, and the paper is brittle and in some places torn, but the words remain legible.

 

 

While living through the past pandemic year, I reread Katherine Anne Porter's luminous autobiographical novella, Pale Horse, Pale Rider, about a youthful Denver newspaperwoman's harrowing illness during the 1918 flu epidemic. 

 

In it, she vividly evoked the wartime era, the delirium of her fever, and the rapture of a near-death experience that Christians call the "beatific vision," from which she emerged after remembering her love for a young soldier, only to learn that he had died in the epidemic. 

 

"Everything before was just getting ready, and after that I was in some strange way altered, ready," she reflected, and she became a serious novelist.

 

The pandemic of 2020-21 has also changed many of us in various ways. I, for one, have been reminded of the privilege of living.

 

I also realized the importance of finishing the memoir, Word for Word, which I have been working on for a while. My monthly newsletter has explained how I chose its cover, and it will describe the way I wrote it and why, and make announcements about its forthcoming publication.

 

 

 

This is the cover of my forthcoming memoir, Word for Word: A Writer's Life.

 

When perusing old black-and-white photographs for possible use in the memoir, I discovered contact sheets taken when posing for an author photo for my first book, Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O'Keeffe.

 

I was surprised to see so many different expressions on my face in front of the camera that day. Eventually, images of that 37-year-old debut author—at a turning point in her personal and professional lives—best expressed the nature of the memoir.

 

The image on the cover is one of three contact sheets given to me by the photographer, Edward Spiro, so I could choose a headshot for the jacket cover of my biography of Georgia O'Keeffe.

 

Four decades later the designer of Word for Word, Paul Barrett, selected poses from the contact sheets to create a cover for the memoir.

 

 

When I began thinking about writing in the first person, I turned to books by memoirists to find out why and how had they written memoirs. Now that I've finished writing my own memoir, Word for Word: A Writer's Life, I want to share them with others.

 

The first book I read was William Zinsser's Inventing the Truth with essays by Annie Dillard, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, Eileen Simpson, and five other memoirists. Evidently, their experiences didn't discourage me.

 

Next was Vivian Gornick's slender little The Situation and the Story, which made it very clear that I had to discard a biographer's distance when writing a memoir. "The situation is the context or circumstance…the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer," she stated.  

 

"Memoirists step carefully from one emotionally charged fragment to another as they explore the psychic geographies of their pasts: the persecutors, the traumas, the betrayals, the secrets, and the shame, but also, thankfully, the love," wrote Janet Mason Ellerby in her fascinating Intimate Reading.

 

After meeting Tom Larson in New Mexico, where we were both teaching at a writer's conference, I read his The Memoir and the Memoirist, where he developed Virginia Woolf's concept of the "I-then and I-now," the way an older self reflects on a younger self in memoir.

 

Then there was Sven Birkerts's The Art of Time in Memoir, in which he explained that memoir is "the artistic transformation of the actual via the alchemy of psychological insight, pattern recognition, and lyrical evocation." It seeemed like the ultimate challenge to me, but one I was willing to attempt.

 

Listed alphabetically, these and other books about memoir are:

The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again by Sven Birkets (2008)

Intimate Reading: The Contemporary Women's Memoir by Janet Mason Ellerby (2001)

The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick (2001)

Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir by Beth Kephart (2013)

The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading & Writing Personal Narrative by Thomas Larson (2007)

To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction by Philip Lopate (2013)

Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature edited by Meredith Maran (2016)

Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir edited by William Zinsser (1998)

Writers like myself have had an easier time than many others during the pandemic because we are used to working by ourselves at home. As we have eliminated all but the most essential errands and other activities, we have more uninterrupted hours to write. It's even a little like being at an arts colony.

 

Yet it's been impossible to avoid the fear of getting the virus, great sadness about those we have lost to it, and worry about all the other anxieties engulfing that nation.

 

As the days darken at the end of a very dark year, I remember the words of writer Henry James: "We work in the dark--we do what we can--we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.  The rest is the madness of art." It's a reason, I believe, for writers to keep writing.

 

I'm grateful that the tradition of placing illuminated holiday trees along main roads in nearby villages has been extended this year to my village. Now a pine sparkles in front of my house after dusk every evening, a beacon of beauty in the dark night