…as I was earlier:
In this case, however, the subject isn’t “bad memory” in the sense of “Huh? Did I just say something?” It’s more along the lines of, “Holy sh!t. Did I actually live through that?!?”
Via the MAD about Words blog (discovered, in turn, via DCWYTBMA), we have word of a definitive list — from Entertainment Weekly, of all unlikely sources — of an enormous range of recent memoirs and autobiographies:
The genre shows no signs of slowing down, though it’s difficult to imagine a narrative that’s left unexplored. ”The bar keeps going higher,” says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly. ”Well, you were a drug addict, but did you kill anybody? Well, you killed somebody, but did you do it with your bare hands? Well, you were hungry, but were you as hungry as Frank McCourt?…”
What follows is a selective list — believe it or not, we actually left some stuff out — of memoirs that have been written since 1995. (Sorry, Ms. Walters, one of the things we’ve omitted is celebrity autobiographies.) So take a look and see if your life, or something resembling it, has already been spoken for.
Stewart Neville (who participates as “Conduit” in the blogalogue at various writerly sites) is an Irishman with a hard-boiled fictional voice and a voice of sweet reason — or at least reason, period — when not constrained by a “Once upon a time… The End” frame.
This Sunday is Father’s Day in the US. Last week, 20 years ago, my Dad died. I thought a fitting tribute to both of these occasions would be to post here a short story which was, in many ways, a story of my Dad (although none of the actual events described in it occurred to him). That’s Dad in the photo at the left, circa 1943-44, when he was in training for a while at Texas A&M.