Writing Memoir with Betsy Bonner

Memoir is not autobiography, which is intended to cover the whole life to date, but a short and significant stretch of a life—like a novel.

It’s also different from “autofiction:” it takes its obligation to truth seriously and it’s almost always written in the first person. Memoirists employ a reliable or unreliable narrator to tell their stories. Why and how does a story become a memoir? Why do some books seem as if they had to be written as memoir, and couldn’t have worked in fictional form? What is the shape of a memoir, and what are its boundaries? And how does a memoir turn real people—including its narrator—into characters?

We’ll read some extraordinary memoirs, but classes will be focused on students’ writing, submitted in advance.

Enrollment is limited to 15 students.

Class will meet online on Sundays: February 2, 9, 16, 23, March 3, 9, 16, 23, 30 and April 6.