Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.
Interpretation
The importance of authenticity in memoir writing and the reader's desire for truthful accounts.
In this quote, Augusten Burroughs emphasizes that his identity as a reader precedes that of a writer, highlighting the profound impact of reading on his writing journey. He expresses a strong desire for memoirs to reflect truth and authenticity, indicating that readers seek genuine experiences and narratives that resonate with their own realities.
In practice
During a book club discussion, I can use this quote to highlight the significance of truth in memoirs.
This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.
The truth is humbling, terrifying, and often exhilarating. It blows the doors off the hinges and fills the world with fresh air.
Some damage is too severe, some harm endures. And what you have to do is accept it. And by accept it I mean, don’t be the paralyzed person in the bed who is waiting to walk again. Realize, it’s never gonna happen. And find some other way to get around –swing from a vine, get a Mad Max wheelchair. Anything but…wait.
But then, look at me. My brain is incorrectly formed, and I'm shaped like a tube. Plus, I'm an alcoholic, a "survivor" of childhood sexual abuse, was raised in a cult and have no education. So, really, if you think about it, the only thing that separates me from the guy with the stinky foot and no teeth is a book deal and some cologne.
I think part of the reason I'm attracted to Foster is because he's such a mess. I mean, the people I have loved in my life have never been easy to love. I'm not used to normal. I'm used to disaster. I don't know, as messed up as he is, he's also sort of exciting, sort of a challenge. I'm accustomed to working for love.
Time moves only forward, never back. We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away. You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.
There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.
I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.
Quite, quite,' she thought with a little sigh. 'It's always like this in their adventures. To save and be saved. I wish somebody would write a story sometime about the people who warm up the heroes afterward.
We all fear loneliness, madness, dying. Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, Leopardi and Hart Crane will not cure those fears. And yet these poets bring us fire and light.
Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.
Fiction is a lie that is told in the service of truth.
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