Today, I’m overwhelmed by the process and choices of ebook publishing. As book designer Joel Friedlander describes it, the process looks like an “out-of-control spaghetti party.” Doubt creeps in when I look at the number of romance, mystery, thriller, and erotic books on the do-it-yourself site.

My baby is none of the above. It’s literary mainstream. It doesn’t have too many adjectives and adverbs. The F word appears in it exactly 0 times. Hey, I better stop trying NOT to sell my book here. It’s titillating in other ways—ways that complex thinkers, literati, and others in the formerly rarefied air of publishing can appreciate. It’s lonely at the top.

OK, I’m coming back down now.

Developing the “narrative,” staying “on message”—these are oft-used phrases in politics and in writing. Just as writers are advised to know their reader, politicians only stay in office if they speak to their constituents’ interests.

Listening to Terry Gross last night interviewing J.R. Moehringer who is the author of the memoir Tender Bar, I was captured by his phrase—keeping “the dogs of Narcissism” at bay when writing his own memoir. He was explaining that when he ghost wrote the memoir for Andre Agassi he didn’t have that concern. He had […]

You don’t get to the guts of your story or memoir and the reason you think it’s so important to write and share with others by a linear approach to surface events or a timeline. You get to it by (cliche alert:) spilling your guts. You get to your memoir or story through an entry point, by deep resonant honesty that let’s you into your story as a trusted, detached, at times un-sentimental (not disinterested or dis-associated, but detached) observer.

• Does the observer (writer) really alter the outcome? Or does the outcome retroactively alter the observer (writer)?• In the Self-fulfilling-Prophecy dynamic what comes first? The Self or the Prophecy. Or is there a third option, as in Buddhist thought: dependent co-arising (or co-dependent arising)? • As in life, a developed Sense of Time is all-important to writing memoir. Once you tap the archetypal current (time eternal) of your story, you know how/when to dilate or contract Time.

One sweeping difference between autobiography and memoir is that the former is often an intriguing record of the journey of the extraordinary person (Shirley MacLane, Barack Obama, Isadora Duncan) and of the ordinary, or commonplace, parts of the life they might have lived, bringing our heroes down to our size. We like to know the human side of our Giants. Conversely, memoir has come to signify the extraordinary life circumstances of us ordinary folk. The skill required to craft that memoir resides in all of us, no matter how commonplace, we think our lives. If you feel you have a story to tell, you do. That’s a start

No one has adequately explained then, why Madame Bovary’s name (which appeared in 1856) rolls off tongues easily today. Not so that of Mrs P, whose disdain for marriage and explicit reluctance to give herself to her children were too close to reality. Some things had best remain in the shadows even in fiction.

Flaubert’s Mme Bovary has adulterous affairs at a level that makes Edna’s discreet dalliance seem negligible (by today’s standards). Although, played out with different details, both adulteresses, ultimately overwhelmed by despair, submit to forms of self destruction.

what I learned from Fierce Attachments. It has much more to do with Gornick the writer than Gornick the daughter. In the following passage, which comes on page 175 near the end of the book, I feel a surge of exaltation. Yes! This narrator triumphs and thrives despite all; how resilient we are, when we find our craft and art.