Hi, Sisters. It’s time to take a little break from TSP, regroup, and see where we’re at. In the interim, enjoy all the fabulous content. If you are looking for my memoir content, please come see me here, at my personal blog, where it’s all memoir, all the time. Enjoy. And keep in touch. Allbest, Marion

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IT’S BEEN A great time for my irreverent little book on writing. Today I will be on the wonderful NPR show, Talk of the Nation. I’d love you to listen it, of course, though you can hear it again this evening via the wonders of digital recording. Want to know how?

It’s easy. It’s right here on the NPR site.

Also today, the ever-wonderful Gotham Writer’s Workshop has published their newsletter in which they say the loveliest things. How’s this for a quote: “While there have been other writing books, there’s been nothing like Marion Roach Smith’s The Memoir Project.  Her book is a disarmingly frank, but wildly fun, distillation of all the unsentimental lessons that teach you to write with purpose.” I am delighted. You can read the rest, here.

The book is getting other great coverage, including being named one of the top ten reads of the summer by Boston’s public radio station, WBUR, and by being wonderfully featured in the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News. You can see that fine feature piece here.

One of my favorite write-ups is in the Philadelphia alternative weekly, CityPaper, who loved the book, leading off the review by stating, “Marion Roach Smith’s guide to memoir writing made me want to do two things: learn more about Smith and write a memoir. I’d say that makes it a roaring success.”

Have you got your copy? You can buy it here as a paperback, here as an ebook or, if you’d like me to read it to you, go to Audible.com’s site for the book and let me whisper in your ear.

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1. New Book: The Memoir Project THE MEMOIR PROJECT is the name of my new book....

THE MEMOIR PROJECT is the name of my new book. Accompanied by the subtitle, A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life, the book’s title reflects it contents – a little irreverent, while being very how-to about writing what you know. When it was time to give a title to the book, those words seemed to sum it up best.

After all, you want people to “get” the book right from the title. And they seem to be doing just that. I received a really wonderful boost from Poets & Writers, a magazine I’ve read and adored for more than 30 years. (In fact, I once had a t-shirt with their logo, and I remember that I was 21 at the time, so it’s a long love affair). They not only featured the video on their fabulous site, but ran a few lines of real praise.

Though perhaps nothing made me quite so happy as getting a great review in Kirkus, that ever-hard-to-please trade magazine read by book stores and libraries, as a guide to what to buy. Thank you, Kirkus. I promise to live up to your fine words in all my teaching. And speaking of teaching, I was invited to do just that on the ever-marvelous site BookPage, where they let me publish what I call my Memoir Manifesto.

On Blog Talk Radio last week, my sister, Margaret Roach, and I were interviewed for an hour. And early into that interview we realize that of all the wacky things we’ve done together – including writing a blog in tandem – that we’d never been interviewed together, despite having written 6 books between the two of us, as well as countless magazine articles, and having appeared separately on many of the same TV shows, including MARTHA. Margaret was able to bring real depth to the conversation on memoir, having just published one of her own.

While on air this week, Margaret said some very surprising (to me) things about being my sister. Have a listen, and you’ll learn something about why we call our blog She Said, She Said.

So what does all this mean? That the book is out. Finally out. It’s a much-improved version of the self-published edition we put out last year entitled Realia, and along with that new title, it has a new publisher, Grand Central, who I adore, and new pages that include an algorithm for how to make a story interesting to others. Don’t believe me? It’s foolproof, I promise, and I hope you’ll check it out in the new book.

These days you’ll find that all my memoir writing content has migrated to a new site, www.marionroach.com, and that here, on TSP, I’ll be concentrating on the myriad topics of the sisterhood. And why not? I know a thing or two about it.

Please stay tuned. There’s so much more to come.

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Alice Eve Cohen, Julie Metz, and Nanch Bachrach, authors of What I Thought I Knew, Perfection and The Center of the Universe, respectively, were the participants on a panel I moderated last year at the Spencertown Arts Academy’s annual book festival, where we appeared alongside such literary luminaries as keynote speaker Susan Orlean. We had a blast, as I wrote here, after the event.

These three women met while serving together on another memoir panel, and soon discovered that they have plenty in common. For one thing, they are all short, thus the name of their road show. But more than that, they have each written compelling, highly praised memoirs about a central role in a woman’s life – daughter, lover, or mother – like three acts in a play. Brilliantly, they saw the common thread here and combined their three stories. As a huge fan of the trio, I can tell you that their three tales are so improbable they could only be true, and that each of these fine writers has found meaning and humor in chaos.

So, if you are in the area of one of their shows, go see them. Better still, got a favorite venue in your area? Invite them. It’s the sisterly thing to do. You’ll be forever glad you did since they are worth their combined weight in rubies.

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ACCENTUATE THE COMPLICATED. Yes, I know, the phrase does not have the syncopation of the wildly more popular (as well as musical), “Ac-cen-tu-ate the positive,” but as far as I can tell, the complicated makes better memoir. You might come to agree with me if you read on.

This is a constant source of struggle in my memoir class. Wanting to be heard, students write the details of their lives, and because these details are the stuff of their personal experiences, they mistakenly think that others will find them compelling. As a result, we get a lot of first drafts that say little more, for example, than how very much a woman dislikes her husbands friends. She doesn’t like one of them in particular. Not at all. She can’t stand him. Not a bit. Nope. And while the phrases of her piece change, they each merely paraphrase the one before, restating the surface issue. To succeed, a memoir needs to go deeper.

“What is it about your husband’s best friend that disturbs you?” I’ll ask, knowing that for the first go-round or two of such questioning we’ll get responses like, “He’s just so, you know, ugh, he just drives me crazy.” By the way, this is also the way my friends communicate. And no, my friend are no more interesting than yours. This is the way we’ve all learned to communicate, and it tells us little.

And yet the piece that uses not liking the husband’s friend as illustration of something probably has great potential, particularly if the writer can get to the heart of the matter – her heart, in this case. Perhaps her husband’s loyalty to his friend touches off great anxiety in the wife. Perhaps this has to do with pondering whether he has bad judgment. After all, whose judgment could be more important to her than his? In a good marriage, he is called upon to share equally in the decisions.

Oooh, now we’re getting somewhere. Feel that frisson, that little charge of electricity in the air? That’s what happens when memoir gets richer, when you take it deeper, and mine it for the universal. Now I’m relating to the tale.

Where did I learn this trick? From Dear Abby, the life-advice columnist’s column. Oh yeah. No one goes to the heart of the matter faster than Abby, answering lifelong issues in a paragraph, daily in my newspaper. I’ve written about Abby before, though previously only in culinary appreciation.

Memoir tips are all around you, folks. Read Dear Abby. You’ll learn a world about getting to the universal in the specifics of your life.

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ALL SHE KNOWS, she learned from the birds. It’s a slight exaggeration, but only slight, as sister Margaret explains in her gorgeous piece from PARADE magazine of this week. A lovely piece of memoir, read it here.

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A RECENT STUDENT said simply, “I write to understand myself.” And I loved that. The world would be a better place if we all understood ourselves just the eensiest bit more, don’t you agree? Does it mean that all the people who are writing about themselves should publish? Of course not. In fact, this particular student has no aspirations toward publishing. And good for him. His aspirations delight me, as does his increasing awareness of the life he leads. How about you? Have you got something you’d like to examine about yourself? I bet you do, and that all you need is a little inspiration. Here’s some.

Here are some great reads that might inspire you to write down something about you.

One of my new favorite websites is Bookslut which, true to its name, is passionate about the printed page. Home to reviews, features, a blog, and columns, this is a place for lovers of the book. And it is here that I discovered Deb Olin Unferth, whose adventures in socialism sound like the perfect memoir for those of us who want to learn to laugh at ourselves while learning a little something about what one woman did to follow her political leanings. The title is Revolution: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War (Henry Holt).  It’s next on my bookshelf, and can be on yours, as well.

That book reminded me that I’ve been meaning to tell you about the astonishing Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family, (Harper Collins, 2011) by Tamara Chalabi, whose insights and exquisite use of details make this book positively shimmer. Chalabi’s father was among those who provided the U.S. with intelligence on weapons of mass destruction that led up to our misguided invasion of Iraq. Talk about a difficult detail to write about. She does it beautifully, and while you might think that details such as this do not appear in your life, think again. What gnarly thing is it exactly that keeps you from writing something down? Right. That one. Read this, and learn how to turn those previous obstacles into firm navigation markers. And here’s the beautiful part of Tamara Chalabi’s book: that is but one small detail of her story. Read it and learn, sisters.

For those of us newshounds who cannot get enough of life behind the keyboard/camera/microphone, there is a fine book by Belva Davis entitled Never in My Wildest Dreams: A Black Woman’s Life in Journalism. The first black woman television news reporter in the West, she has reported on some of the best stories of recent memory. Here is all you need to know: The incomparable Maya Angelou wrote of this book,  “No people can say they understand the times in which they have lived unless they have read this book.”

For those of us who like to eat and cook, and eat, and well, I guess this is all of us, the most fun I’ve had outside the kitchen is reading the brand new Blood, Bones and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, by Gabrielle Hamilton, the famous chef from Prune, NYC’s cool-chic-fun eatery. Gabrielle Hamilton is a writer and a cook, and while you may know that she is among the best chefs around, the writing part, quite honestly, is giving her culinary skills a serious run for their money. This book is a total joy. The structure is the key here, and I will nor ruin if for you, except to say that you’ve rarely had more thrills reading about food, I promise. A contributor to The New York Times’ Chef’s Column, the New Yorker, Bon Appétit and other food magazines, Hamilton earned an MFA in fiction, studied at Iowa Writers Workshop and has the words to prove it.

Not to be outdone in the kitchen or the page, is Kim Severson, whose memoir, Spoon Fed: How Eight Cook Saved My Life. The Atlanta bureau chief for The New York Times, this foodie can write, as well, and dish, and tell a good tale about one’s life. What I love about her is her generosity, crediting those people who have taught her some good solid lessons. It’s an intelligent woman who credits those who educate her, yes, or do you not remember that is one of our 15 Rules for Us Girls to Live By?

Upcoming memoirs, you ask? We can look forward to a memoir by Ashley Judd coming out with All That Is Bitter and Sweet (Ballantine Books) in April. And then, my very favorite wait-by-the bookstore upcoming tidbit is that the great Angelica Huston is penning her memoirs, to be released in 2013 by Scribner in the United States and Simon & Schuster in Britain. She reports to be writing about “the exceptional highs and lows” of her life, and will discuss her famous father, John Huston, her beautiful mother, Enrica Soma, some insights into being part of the only family trio – grandfather, father (Walter Huston) and herself – to win Oscars and, of course, Jack Nicholson.

Read a good memoir by a sister, sisters? Add to my list, please.

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I’M IN FOR some necessary change. And you know what? Good for me. I’ve been feeling a little stuffed up recently, and not just in my nose with the ongoing winter in the northeast, but in my life. And necessary change is just what is called for, or so says Sheilaa, our TSP astrologer, whose predictions are always spot on. Have you read what she has to say about you?

I’m an Aries. No surprise, with my red hair and fiery nature. Did you know I write about red hair here? And that fiery nature? Well, I’m a memoirist, and maybe this piece is the very best place to read up on just how hot it can get around here and whose job it is to cool me down.

Sheilaa tells me that my wildest dreams will come true, but only if I do the work. Such a  great challenge. Speaking only of my professional life and my wildest dreams, as well as my efforts to achieve those dreams, all this will be given a real outing this year as my book on writing memoir comes out this June, published by Grand Central. And between now and then (and for a good long time after that) you can find me and that book on Twitter (mroachsmith@twitter.com), on Facebook (The Memoir Project), teaching at The Chautauqua Institute as well as at The Arts Center of the Capital Region, and launching a new how-to-write memoir website.

Follow along by watching this space, sisters.

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CHEAP NOTEBOOKS ENJOY the singular fame of being one of only two things you need to be a memoirist. The other, of course is a pen. You can add index cards to the list, but if you go out into your daily rounds carrying little more than a pen and a notebook you can write memoir. And you know what? You don’t have to believe me. This time, I’m bringing in a reliable witness.

It’s The Pink of Perfection, and with a blog name like that, you can believe every word.

I’ve written before about the small toolbox needed to write memoir. But here, for the record, is the very best testimony I’ve seen in, well, forever. Read up, memoirists, and get to work.

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I’VE BEEN WRESTLING with the damnedest feelings. Vague one minute, sharp as knives the next, they make me toss, turn, and turn up the oddest diagnoses for them. That is, until I consulted the oracle of upstate, my big sister, and while what she had to say may not sound all that therapeutic to you, it saved my life.

I described my feelings to Margaret. She listened, thought for a moment, and proclaimed rightly that it was a bad case of empty nest; that ever since my daughter had taken this most recent and totally appropriate surge forward in her independence, I had lost hours each days with her, and that I was missing those hours.

Right she was. Nailed it. Right on the head. And we were good for a few weeks, until we weren’t, and I brought up the topic again saying, only half-kidding, “Hmm, I wonder if there is a drug for this.”

“If there isn’t,” she quipped, “there’s probably an app.”

And I laughed like hell, and moved on.

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