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| Hard-working mother in college |
Memoir isn’t a
life story. That is autobiography. Memoir is one particular period in a person’s
life, one instance or one experience in which the memoirist has come to an
epiphany or several epiphanies from that experience and wishes to share that
insight with the reader. Memoir provides
insight not merely facts of the experience.
It is not necessary to include
everything that happened in the particular period which the memoirist wishes to
share and elucidate to the reader. The
memoir would be too long and rambling if I included every class taken. After taking over 40 college courses, I decided to write about my experiences in approximately 25 of them. Of course that’s not all I wrote about.
I focused on the trials and tribulations of raising a family of five
children while attending college for ten years, ten of my children’s growing-up
years, ten years of assisting my special needs child to achieve her educational
goals.
Memoirs encapsulate the important
moments, the “aha” moments in the slice of life the memoirist decides to
share. The general, the sameness in
experience has no place in memoir. Memoir
needs to be poignant and full of meaning, and in my case, humorous. For that was a way to cope in the daily grind
of going to college as a mother of five.
Has anyone read a good memoir
lately that I could add to my reading list?
