Writing About Lives

“A good memoir does more than dredge up secrets from the writer’s past. A
good memoir filters a life through resonant narrative, and in doing so must
achieve a balance between language and candor. It was not the subject matter
of my memoirs that I hoped would be startling, but rather language’s
capacity to name what was nameless, to define what had once been vague and
chaotic. The chief privilege of writing a memoir was the opportunity to go
back and make sense of events that left me dumbstruck, mired in confusion,
unarmed with the luminous power of words.”

~ From Bernard Cooper’s essay “Marketing Memory.”