Looking Back: Moving on Memoir As Prologue [Paperback]

Janice Rubin (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 187 pages
• Publisher: Jay Street Pub (June 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1889534447
• ISBN-13: 978-1889534442
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,803,365 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Survivor Stories, October 10, 2000

By 

A.E. Wort (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Looking Back: Moving on Memoir As Prologue (Paperback)

Interlarded in this how-to on memoir-writing are amazing vignettes.

There is nothing contrived about these authentic anecdotes by real people managing life's vicissitudes.

These are real-life survivor stories.

If Ms Rubin's next book isn't a shooting script or teleplay based on these entries, perhaps it ought to be. In a way, this book is a blueprint for a movie or serialized television program. As I read the personal essays, I kept imagining them as episodes in a television series -- one that I wish was on-air.

In an industry short on new ideas, I'll be very surprised if this book isn't optioned. It should be.

As for the instructive text (the how-to part of this book): very easy to synthesize and apply to one's own writing.

I happened to have caught the author on, of all places, a local New Jersey cable news channel. She struck me as a late-blooming Renaissance woman with energy, ideas, originality, focus. I eagerly look forward to her next book...unless we can get her to run for elected office! The world could use more like Janice Rubin.

5.0 out of 5 stars Survivor Stories, October 10, 2000

By 

A.E. Wort (Washington, DC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Looking Back: Moving on Memoir As Prologue (Paperback)

Interlarded in this how-to on memoir-writing are amazing vignettes.

There is nothing contrived about these authentic anecdotes by real people managing life's vicissitudes.

These are real-life survivor stories.

If Ms Rubin's next book isn't a shooting script or teleplay based on these entries, perhaps it ought to be. In a way, this book is a blueprint for a movie or serialized television program. As I read the personal essays, I kept imagining them as episodes in a television series -- one that I wish was on-air.

In an industry short on new ideas, I'll be very surprised if this book isn't optioned. It should be.

As for the instructive text (the how-to part of this book): very easy to synthesize and apply to one's own writing.

I happened to have caught the author on, of all places, a local New Jersey cable news channel. She struck me as a late-blooming Renaissance woman with energy, ideas, originality, focus. I eagerly look forward to her next book...unless we can get her to run for elected office! The world could use more like Janice Rubin.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars As a Long Time Journal Writer..., January 11, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Looking Back: Moving on Memoir As Prologue (Paperback)

Perhaps through some mysterious motivation to unpack the "secret key", I have always kept journals, from mid-adolescence through my current mid-forties. They have organically flowed from diary-like documentation of the days events and impressions, to psycho-spiritual contemplations, to soulful prayers and invitations to Spirit. At particular points along the path, I have wondered if anyone besides myself, perhaps family generations down the line, might discover and read these volumes. In the same breath, that question evaporates. Why would anyone be interested? What would I have to offer? Until, that is, I read Ms. Rubin's book. Each piece of writing she presents is a delicious little bite of a bigger story, of a bigger life, leaving me hungry for more, but yet it is complete unto itself like a perfect little jewel. The gifts that I got from this book are several fold. But perhaps the most important one is the possibility that I have something of value to leave through my writing. This is deeply affirmed. I have since begun the sometimes arduous, but mostly exhilarating task of systematically going through my journals and chosing particular stories and impressions as the raw material for expansion and elaboration, with a vision of creating my own autobiographical compilation. For whose consumption beside my own? Ah, that's still the mystery! And why 4 instead of 5 stars? I wanted to know the outcome of the life of each of the contributing writers!