4 November 2015/1:30 PM
Before I realized that I was ready to start this book project, I began reading and thinking a lot about memoirs. Did this thinking/reading start when I requested and then almost finished Mary Karr’s The Art of Memoir? Now I can’t remember. The memoirs that I’ve read, and the theories about memoirs and remembering one’s past experiences that I’ve studied, focus a lot on accessing and communicating inner, and usually uncomfortable (embarrassing, painful) truths through the details of one’s life. Is that what I want to write?
What story am I trying/wanting to tell? How much of it is about the specific details of my life and how much of it is about the ideas/theories/authors/experiences that have moved me, shaped me, consumed me? For me, it is about the latter.
Having read 15 more pages since my last post on Lynda Barry’s Syllabus, I’m seeing that in her book she hopes to give an account of the evolution of her ideas about images, drawing, thinking and creating art and how she came to teach them (and still does) at UW Madison.
Maybe my book project could be about the evolution (or development…what other non-liner/progress word can I use here?) of my undisciplined approach to living–thinking, feeling, writing, creating?