You guys,
Not all memoirs pass the Memoir Snob test.
The test is simple. If I’m daydreaming about my book at dinnertime and counting down the minutes until I can cozy up in bed and read then it passes the test. Otherwise it gets tossed aside.
I recently went on a sobriety memoir binge after reading my new favorite memoir—Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp—but tossed aside all three books by page 100. That’s when it hit me.
I always thought I loved books because of the topic, the content, what the book was about. I thought I loved Drinking: A Love Story because I related to the intense, intimate ways Knapp felt about drinking. But upon dissection of this beautiful book I found it was not the story as much as it was the way in which the story was written. It was her voice. And it turns out voice is not this elusive thing that takes years and years and years of writing to find. Voice is simply which tools the writer prefers over others. So rather than read her words and scream to the sky that “I will never write a book as beautiful as this!” I could definitively pick out the tools she used, how and when she used them, and then replicate them in my own writing.
That’s what I talk about in today’s podcast episode: five specific tools Knapp used and how and when she used them.
Shortly after I read this memoir I read another book called The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth and learned that these tools she used had names, names I’d never heard of like Anaphora, Epistrophe, Diacope, Parataxis, and Pleonasm. These new terms have entered my vocabulary and will never leave, which has taken my snobbery to an obnoxious level. Sam asked if I really need to use these terms when I talk about them, when I could just as easily say “repetition” or “plain English.” It was like someone asking me five years ago if I really needed a wine glass with a stem.
So please enjoy my favorite episode yet, about my favorite book yet, coupled with my nerdy takeaways from a book about words I can barely pronounce (in fact I kept calling it “neoplasm” instead of the correct term, “pleonasm”).
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Until next week,
Charlie
Always learning from you, Charlie and your attention to craft.
“… it was not the story as much as it was the way in which the story was written”
So good Charlie. And awesome to see you’re on an upward trajectory with the podcast (: