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Still, using devices more common to other memoirists, Nabokov can draw tears from me at certain passages as predictably as if turned on by a spigot. Students who fear sentimentality as death have to study Nabokov, who proves that sentimentality is only emotion you haven’t proven to the reader—emoti…

This talent for truth includes a voice’s bold ability to render events we find unbelievable elsewhere. On the first page of Hilary Mantel’s Giving Up the Ghost—for my money a book as worship-worthy as any of her prizewinning fiction—we hear about her encounters with the spirit world. On a staircase…

The secret to any voice grows from a writer’s finding a tractor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way. While an artist consciously constructs a voice, she chooses its elements because they’re natural expressions of character. So above all, a voice has to sound like the …

You’re seeking enough quiet to let the Real You into your mind. Inspiration—the drawing into the body of some truth-giving spirit ready to walk observantly through the doors of the past. Then, with eyes still closed, approach the memory you’re scared to set down. Start by composing the scene in car…

Forget how inventing stuff breaks a contract with the reader, it fences the memoirist off from the deeper truths that only surface in draft five or ten or twenty. Yes, you can misinterpret—happens all the time. “The truth ambushes you,” Geoffrey Wolff once said. (More on those hair-raising reversal…