Book Review: Thinking About Memoir and Chosen Forever

by Susan Krawitz, April 28, 2008

If, as Oscar Wilde once said, memory is the diary that we all carry about with us, then memoir is this inner record made tangible. More and more of us are choosing to share these personal musings with the world, often with great enthusiasm but varying degrees of success. Fortunately, two masters of memoir have recently upped this genre’s literary ante; one to offer advice on doing it, the other to show how it is done.

Memoir writing, claims Woodstock resident Abigail Thomas, isn’t about remembering things in perfect Kodachrome—but it is about nearly everything else. Thomas has published two memoirs, Safekeeping and the critically acclaimed A Three Dog Life. If memoir, as she states in her intro, is the story of how we got from here to there, then how best to release that story is the work of this intimate, consummately inspiring book.

Thomas is a stellar guide. She begins with the basics of getting started, and moves right through to the grittiness of getting real. She addresses the darkest concerns of the memoirist-to-be: What if you can’t remember anything? What if your memoir upsets your loved ones? Why on earth should you do this at all?
Her prose is colorful and deeply revealing, and the exercises she provides leave no emotional stone unturned. Write two pages in which someone keeps his temper in check. Two pages of how you spent your allowance. Two pages of what waits in ambush. Remembering feeling is important, she advises. So is color and scent. Structure, however, is not, nor is chronology. What does concern her, and passionately, is emotional truth.

Truth concerns fellow Woodstocker Susan Richards as well. In Chosen Forever, the sequel to her New York Times bestseller Chosen By a Horse, Richards opens her life once again to share her struggles, lessons, and surprising joys.