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While I read and enjoy fiction, both as entertainment and sometimes for what it can teach about real life, and non-fiction, for learning, the memoir, which I also enjoy, is somewhere in the middle. It’s true, or at least some person’s view of the truth, but done well it can still entertain, just like a fictional story. We all have stories that, given the prerequisite writing chops, could be entertaining. Which leads me to a few observations about books like this (and others like it), as well as where these stories worked best for me, and a few reasons why some didn’t.
One of the positives is that these short, autobiographical stories are variously interesting, entertaining, enlightening, and all the other adjectives sometimes used to describe a good tale of this type. They stand on their own. But they also give the reader some exposure to an author they might not be aware of, and what avid reader isn’t on the lookout for that? To pretend the contributing authors don’t see this as a marketing tool would be naïve, but it is marketing that is a win-win. With the hundreds of books I’ve read in the last few years, I’d only read a handful of these authors. Getting a glimpse into their way with words is much more efficient for a reader than reading sample after sample of their novels. Plus, many of us like the glimpse behind the scenes, at the real person behind the fiction we’ve been reading.
Which leads me to the one aspect of this collection that didn’t work as well for me. These were ten of the stories that broke the pattern of the autobiographical memoir, instead using the same exercise of writing about something from twenty-five years in the past from the viewpoint of one of the author’s characters. While pertinent as a writing exercise, which is the reason these pieces were originally done, and on the surface a good marketing move, I found these stories much harder to get into. The exception was the character I was familiar with, which seems the opposite of the desired effect.
Anonymous
Posted April 25, 2013
No text was provided for this review.
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