Magical Memoir Moments

Barack Obama at Google

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Elizabeth Gilbert

Today was Blogging-in-WordPress Lesson #2 with my son Anthony.  I wanted to know how to embed a video, so he showed me how.  Yippee!  Here is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love.

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Burn After Reading: Memoirs in the Movies

My husband Stuart and I went to our local theater Friday night and saw the Coen brothers’ latest film, Burn After Reading.    One reviewer called it a smart movie about stupid people.  I would call it not-quite-smart movie but definitely agree about the stupid people part. Only a viewer obsessed with memoir would have thought…

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Thank You, Mary Karr!

Yesterday’s New York Times carried an op-ed from Mary Karr about the way opponents of Barack Obama like to diminish him by calling him a memoirist, just as they make fun of his career as a community organizer. Karr, who has written several excellent memoirs herself, including and describes why memoir writing is a good…

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Stanley Fish On Three Popular Narratives and Their Limits

Stanley Fish in yesterday’s New York Times writes about a recent essay by Charles Van Doren in the July 28 issue of The New Yorker.  If you saw Quiz Show, directed by Robert Redford, you know that Charles Van Doren disgraced himself, his family, and perhaps even academic life, by participating in a rigged quiz…

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Doris Lessing

I just finished reading a New York Times review of Doris Lessing’s new novel/memoir (strange combo). The review focused on the author’s struggle for emotional control of memory. Lessing apparently hated her mother and saw both parents as tragic figures. In this book she tries, without total success, apparently, to understand and forgive both parents….

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