I was looking at this big stack of books in my home office, books I’m dying to read, and rhetorically asking myself how to make time for them. I thought, I need someone to hold me accountable.
Book club? Omg if I schedule one more thing to have to go to…
Some kind of email book club? Still probably a deadline, and I want this to be fun and loose so I actually do it.
Goodreads? No more social media.
So I’m gonna use this space to hold myself accountable. I’m going to read memoirs and blog about them. Not really reviews, just informal responses, maybe with a little real life splashed in. No rules. Some of the memoirs I read will be second or third reads. Sometimes I will link to posts I’ve done on these books elsewhere. Sometimes I will write a lot, sometimes only a little. I might read three in a month and then none for three months.
But I’m going to read 100 of them.
I might be losing it. Or it’s the best idea I’ve ever had.
Read a memoir, blog about a memoir, repeat. Preparation for my own, because I AM writing one, don’t want it to be shitty or derivative, and am good with the process taking a long time.
As I’m relying on chunks of free time heretofore unknown to me to read these books, this project might actually outlive me, you see.
Now accepting recommendations in the comments, please. Stay tuned for posts on my bedside table books in residence: Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, and Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir.
another writing mom 
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I love reading memoirs. A few of my favorites include
Running with scissors
Glass Castle
Night
Orange is the New Black
A Long Way Gone
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Autobiography of a face
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Don’t Go to The Dogs Tonight
Wild
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Thanks for the recs!
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I have Beverly Cleary’s two memoirs – A Girl from Yahmill and On My Own Two Feet – and I would strongly recommend them both. My own copies have been read so much the covers are about ready to fall off, haha.
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I love this idea! I just read Camille T. Dungy’s memoir Guidebook to Relative Strangers and reviewed it over here: https://thedrunkenodyssey.com/2017/07/11/buzzed-books-53-guidebook-to-relative-strangers-journeys-into-race-motherhood-and-history/. It has a great combination of emotion and intellect, which I found particularly compelling in a book about parenting (among other things).
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Oh good one! Adding it. And great review. I love what you said about the daughter learning to sing passage and the risk of sentimentality. In Karr’s “The Art of Memoir,” she says that sentimentality is “just emotion you haven’t yet proven to the reader.” That exploded my brain bc of course you can write about anything anything anything but if you haven’t developed the emotional heart of the story, the sap is going to stand out like a sappy thumb. It was very freeing to read. Just prove it, I tell myself.
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