Patricia Hampl's
I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory remains, for me, the best book on the topic, even all these years later. My students are reading the first two chapters this week. They'll find passages like this one:
Maybe a reader's love of memoir is less an intrusive lust for confession than a hankering for the intimacy of this first-person voice, the deeply satisfying sense of being spoken to privately. More than a story, we want a voice speaking softly, urgently, in our ear. Which is to say, to our heart. That voice carries its implacable command, the ancient murmur that called out to me in the middle of the country in the middle of the war—remember, remember (I dare you, I tempt you).
Read more...
