Memoir

One of the features I really like about my Nook is the ability to read ebooks in the store (without purchasing them).  You only get to read each book for an hour a day, but the feature has given me an opportunity to try out some books before I buy them.

In some cases, such as with How Not to Rescue a Racehorse, I was really glad I was able to try it out first.

First of all, this was one of those ebooks that was far shorter than normal book length.  Despite the many chapters (they were just really short chapters), it was more of a novella or a longish short story, whatever that length would be called as a memoir.  I was able to read it all in one sitting at the bookstore, so I never actually bought the ebook.

I was glad I didn't end up spending any money, actually, because it was rather disappointing.  The story got bogged down in uninteresting details, and then ended far sooner than it could have -- and I don't mean word count or page length.  I mean that the story really needed a lot more depth and follow-up to it.  The flip ending was especially disappointing, since I wanted to read more about what happened to the horse the author went to all this trouble to rescue.  I wanted to hear the rest of the story, not just the bits about driving the horse around -- the mare's rehabilitation, whether the author eventually got her -- and instead I got some clever joke about the husband knowing what was going on the whole time.

The moral of the story is to remember your audience -- in this case, horse people and rescuers, who are likely to want to know the full story of the horse's rescue -- and make sure you are not shortchanging them by falling short of what they expect -- physically as well as figuratively!

I used to keep a journal religiously.  From the time I was 10 until I was perhaps 25, I wrote in my journals regularly.  Although more recently I've gone digital, replacing my journals with blogs and social media, I still have boxes full of all my old journals.

Journaling is a key skill for writers, a way to exercise your writing "muscles."  It is recommended for all writers to keep journals, even to start out any writing session by journaling for 10 or 15 minutes, whether you write fiction or nonfiction.  But of course journaling has the most value for those who are writing their memoirs.

If you are writing a memoir, keeping a journal can benefit you in more than one way:

• Getting you in the mood to write about yourself, in a reflective sort of tone; limbering up the memoir-writing "muscles"
• Providing fodder for your memoirs -- old journals for the memoir you are currently writing, and today's journal for the one you might write in another year or three or ten
• Giving you a place to experiment with memoir-writing -- possibly even stuff that you might copy and paste into the memoir itself

Journaling is essentially free writing, which many writers interpret as "lots of crap."  You'd be amazed at what flows from the pen (or the keyboard) when you allow yourself to write unfettered by expectations.  You may write something that is worth keeping, perhaps something that becomes part of your memoir or even a piece of fiction.  You also may not write anything worth keeping, but your thoughts and your records of your daily life could someday prove invaluable -- if, say, you write another memoir or your autobiography, or even if you choose to base a ficitonal character or story on your experiences.

Don't underestimate the power of journaling -- as a memoir writer, fiction writer, or even just the power it has to benefit your own life!

I think one of the biggest reasons why we read memoirs is because we are curious about other people's lives: their hardships, as well as their happiness, their pets and personal lives as well as their business lives.  I think that you can see this curiosity in the kinds of memoirs that get published.

One of the most riveting memoirs I've ever read was The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.  This was definitely a case of people's hardships and strange childhoods being fascinating to readers.  When Walls tells about her peculiar childhood, and the kinds of things she went through that I can't even imagine -- being hungry, being poor, living in the desert.  There's something about being so riveted to someone else's story of hardship that makes me feel slightly guilty, but I literally could not put this book down.

Her next book, Half Broke Horses, isn't exactly a memoir -- instead it's a novel about the life of Walls's grandmother.  This one is fascinating for another reason -- her grandmother was a gutsy woman, and of course she lived a very different life than we do now.  In some respects it truly compliments The Glass Castle because it gives the reader an idea of Walls's roots, and the kind of person her grandmother, who she talks about in The Glass Castle, really was.

I think the popularity of these two books, but especially The Glass Castle, shows that often our biggest reason for reading memoirs is curiosity about other people's lives, especially for the element of drama that other people have been through.  If you've ever heard people gossip you know that there is something inexplicably compelling about other people's problems, and many memoirs count on people's natural curiosity!

A little while back, I read A Big Little Life by Dean Koontz, mainly at my mom's urging.  She'd read it and loved it, but I was a little less generous in my praise.  While it was good, I couldn't see what set it apart from many other people's experiences with their dogs -- except, of course, for the fact that the author of this pet memoir was famous.

It made me think a lot about what justifies writing a pet memoir.  A lot of times I think famous authors get away with publishing these things simply because they are famous, and I just don't think that's right.  There are many people in the world with truly unique pet stories to tell; why should we care about someone's perfectly ordinary story simply because the author is famous?

There are, luckily, some really excellent pet memoirs that published because of their uniqueness.  One that comes to mind is Chosen by a Horse, one that may not seem unique to other horse owners and rescuers, but which is extremely unique to the majority of the American population that doesn't own horses.  Another fantastic, and extremely unique, pet memoir is Dewey, about a cat that lived in a small town library and became the library (and town) mascot after he was abandoned down the returned book drop.  And of course, I thought Sex and the Kitty was extremely unique, not because of the subject matter but because of how it was presented.

But with the exception of a very select few, most pet memoirs are not really all that unique.  Does that mean these pets are not special to their owners?  Of course not.  But just because someone is famous, does NOT mean I think it's important for everyone to read about their cat or dog!