I just finished the poet Maggie Smith’s memoir, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” and I am SO fascinated by the idea that having a published writer in your life means sometimes their version of the story is the one that gets told. The entire book is her processing her divorce and I was WILD with curiosity thinking about what it must have been like for the ex-husband (and, um, his new partner) to read.
Does anyone have their own favorite example of a memoir that had them thinking about the other story that could’ve been told by the ex, or the sister, or the mother, or the boss, or the neighbor, or the friend… ? Sometimes I finish a memoir and all I can think about is how maybe, because being human is complicated, we’re all inadvertently unreliable narrators…
by lelalubelle