Customer Reviews

Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again

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This is the best craft book for memoir writers, an intellectual journey with top-flight guides: Nabokov, Karr, Auster, Diller and more. Birkets digs deep into the nature of memory and shows how the greats break many of the "rules" to which new writers cling.

I write fiction -- not memoir -- but I found Birkerts's book applicable to writing in general, and very nicely paired with the Graywolf Press book by Joan Silber, "Art of Time in Fiction." Birkerts looks not only at chronology -- in particular, the blending of present and past perspectives and insights that is essential to memoir -- but also at loose categories of memoir, with chapters on mother-daughter memoirs, father-son memoirs, trauma narratives, coming-of-age stories, and "paradises lost" (with some interesting distinctions on the lyrical writings of, say, Nabokov and Annie Dillard). By the end, I felt like Birkerts had showed me how to look beyond content to form in memoir, while prodding me with a list of great future reads.

This book came into my life at exactly the right time. I'm writing a memoir and dealing with the perpetual problem of time and memory.
Swen Birkert's book is a masterpiece: well-written, informative, well-referenced and an inspiration for memorists. I highly recommend it.

What's the difference between a novel and a memoir?

A novel can be autobiographical, drawn completely from life remembered; a memoir is of course made of memory shaped and dramatized. The Art of Time in Memoir posits that memoir is defined and distinguished by its dual perspective: the writer in the present looking back and reflecting, trying to understand a past version of herself or himself.

In Birkerts' focus on reflection, on how different writers successfully assemble "the puzzle of what happened in the light of subsequent realization," he picks some work in which this is very subtle and artful. For instance, in Jamaica Kincaid's novel Annie John--which he chooses to read as a memoir--there's no overt musing but he argues that the book is crafted so that "emblematic" situations "carry reflective weight."

Birkerts shows that good memoirs, far from being defined by the easy charges of "navel gazing" or "score settling," are serious devotions to understanding and to finding meaning. Through memoir's "careful manipulation of vantage point," Birkerts writes, "it gives artistic form to what is the main business of our ongoing inner life."

The most useful writing books often are concise, like this one, rather than exhaustive (and exhausting). And although Birkerts focuses on one key concept, time, he touches in a profound way on other issues in the genre. The Art of Time in Memoir is a sophisticated explication of a genre that is itself an exciting art form.

I loved this book. Very quickly I found myself in conflict (thus the big trouble reference in the review title). Do I stop reading after three paragraphs so that I can write, as I am inspired to do? Do I keep writing? Do I pull my work and begin to edit? As a student in an MFA program, I found this to be a very helpful book, especially as I had been wrestling with the exact issue for a while, and so had a strong contextual need for the instruction offered by Birkerts. Thanks!