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It’s a cliché to talk about finding a voice, but it does feel arrived at, fixed and immutable as the angel hidden in Michelangelo’s stone. About nine months into working on the first chapter for a proposal (I’d been told I needed a hundred pages and an outline), I started knowing where the words …

Here’s one excerpt about my old man. It’s better than anything I’d done before. But it still sounded so emotionally bald that I only sent it out to a magazine at my husband’s urging.

I tell the only truth I know:
that I am helpless and sorry you’re dying,
that this planet will weigh no les…

The most skillful writers either package facts so they hold this kind of psychological interest, or the data get palmed off in carnal scenes the reader can imagine and engage with on a physical level. In these books, you often don’t notice you’re being fed a string of facts. They’re sprinkled into …

1.  Notify subjects way in advance, detailing parts that might make them wince. So far, no one has ever winced.
2.  On pain of death, don’t show pages to anybody mid-process. You want them to see your best work, polished.
3.  As Hubert Selby told Jerry Stahl, “If you’re writing about somebody you…

Carnality may determine whether a memoir’s any good, but interiority—that kingdom the camera never captures—makes a book rereadable. By rereadable, translate: great. Your connection to most authors usually rests (Nabokov and a few others aside) in how you may identify with them. Mainly, the better …