On Traumatic Memoir

by | Aug 31, 2009 | Writing

This explains so much! [T]rauma-based accounts are often private salvage operations. Rather than assuming continuity, they must, at the deepest level, reflect and somehow compensate for its destruction. For a trauma is a rupture, a break … whether brought on by a...

Truth in Non-Fiction and Memoir

by | Aug 31, 2009 | Writing

[S]cholars have demonstrated the essential fictive nature of all memory. The way we remember things is not necessarily the way they were. This makes memoir, by definition, a form in which reality and imagination blur into a “fourth genre.” The problems of...