“Other people have a right to their privacy. You do not, as a writer, have a right to yours.”
“The reader has to feel that he or she is being dealt with honestly. And if you don’t deal with them honestly, they’ll know it.”
“One of the joys of the memoir is that it can be constructed by image and episode rather than by story and narrative.”
“The difference between bad writing and good writing is as simple as the difference between saying, “A fish swam by,” and “A brown speckled trout with a bruised left fin swept by.”
“Good manners and courtesy matter enormously in life. Writing is too important for us to spend too much time with them.”
—Adam Gopnik, Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing a Memoir
View invitation. Get class now.
Thanks again to best-selling author, essayist, public speaker, lyricist and libretto writer Adam Gopnik, who joined us live Sunday night to share all he’s learned about the mysterious alchemy of rules, practices, and inner secrets that memoir writers can best apply to their own work.
In Five Things I’ve Learned about Writing a Memoir, Adam explores the craft of memoir writing, focusing on the techniques, ethical questions, and “inner secrets” that help personal experiences resonate as universal stories. Through examples from his own work and memoirists such as Elizabeth Gilbert and Jeannette Walls, Adam teaches how writers can transform private memories into meaningful, emotionally engaging narratives for readers.
View invitation. Get class now.
About Adam: Adam, legendary and beloved writer for the New Yorker, has—in his three decades with the magazine—written fiction, humor, memoirs, critical essays, and reported pieces from at home and abroad. He was the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995, and the Paris correspondent from 1995 to 2000. Adam has received three National Magazine awards for essays and for criticism, the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, and the Canadian National Magazine Award Gold Medal for arts writing. In March of 2013, he was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. He lives in New York with his wife, filmmaker Martha Parker, and their two children, Luke Auden and Olivia Esme Claire.
Six celebrated memoirists in our archive have each shared all they’ve learned from their own writing experience — and each, in their Five Things I’ve Learned class, has shared something essential about what the form asks of every writer who attempts it.
Browse the replays below to learn more about each class.
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