What's In Store
Spilling Your Guts 101

by Sandra Dark

Writing a memoir or biography can be the riskiest and most difficult challenge a writer ever faces. Deep truths are about as easy to dig up as tree roots—and even then, truths are always open to interpretation. So if you're thinking about spilling your guts—or someone else's—in print, these books might be helpful.

Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know About Re-searching and Writing Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind. W.W. Norton, 2008. 160 pages. Hardcover. $22.95.

When someone promises to tell me everything I need to know on a given subject, my eyes tend to roll. When that promise is packaged in 160 slim pages, my skepticism ossifies. But Gutkind, founding editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, surprised me.

A group effort by 20 nonfiction writers and teachers, Keep It Real covers an amazing amount of ground. Its 41 brief (mostly 2-3 pages) chapters address a broad range of practical, ethical, and moral issues that writers of nonfiction books, articles, and essays grapple with every day. Many points are potentially sticky, such as Acknowledgement, Composite Characters, Reconstruction of Events, and Writers' Responsibilities to Subjects.

The brevity of the chapters doesn't permit in-depth analyses of these issues. Instead, Gutkind and his compatriots endeavor to lay down a clear, concise roadmap for practicing the creative-nonfiction art and craft without losing your way. As Gutkind observes, "Creative nonfiction writers have a complicated obligation to their readers: to entertain like novelists but to educate like journalists." All without crossing the line into reputation-trashing territory trod by the likes of James Frey, of A Million Little Pieces fame. (The sensationalized Frey controversy was actually the catalyst for Keep It Real.) In that respect, this book succeeds admirably.

The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative, by Thomas Larson. Swallow Press, 2007. 211 pages. Paperback. $16.95.

James Frey notwithstanding, memoir continues to be a popular and evolving form of narrative nonfiction. An established memoirist in his own right, Larson delves into nitty-gritty analyses of memoirs and those who write them. In the process, he shows how scores of writers from Annie Dillard to George Orwell have approached exposing their personal lives to the reading public and dealt with the complex elements inherent to the craft.

I found The Memoir and the Memoirist remarkably enlightening. For instance, Larson points out that what we've become now influences how we remember events of our lives back then. "In memoir," he writes, "we don't just tell the truth. We use the possibilities of the form to guide us into a process by which we try to discover what the truth of our lives may be." The process of researching and writing personal narrative can result in unexpected alterations in long-held "facts" of the memoirist's life, resulting in insights that can be at once unsettling and therapeutic. Larson includes a list of 125 memoirs, each of which he's discussed. This is a valuable book for anyone who contemplates writing a memoir, or who simply enjoys reading them.

How To Do Biography: A Primer, by Nigel Hamilton. Harvard University Press, 2008. 400 pages. Hardcover. $22.95.

If you're itching to write your first biography or memoir, How to Do Biography might be a useful addition to your library. This sequel to Biography: A Brief History walks you through the process, using extensive quotes from classical and modern biographies and memoirs to illustrate points.

The subtitle led me to expect a much more nuts-and-bolts style, and at times I thought Hamilton, a veteran biographer in his own right, leaned too heavily on the quotes without sufficiently sharpening his points. In fact, you could probably learn a great deal of what this book covers by simply analytically reading a stack of quality biographies or memoirs. Even so, I found enough useful insights into the complex and challenging field of writing life stories to make the read worthwhile.

For instance, How to Do Biography discusses the five strands of biographical design, and what they mean to the biographer's approach. Hamilton also deals with how much of your or your subject's life to include in the narrative; how to find and develop the central thread of the story; how to deliver your subject's birth, life events, and (in the case of biography) death; and how to end the book itself (along with a caution on how not to end it).

The final chapter serves as a reality check for anyone aspiring to write a biography or memoir. But if your enthusiasm survives that dash of cold water, you might just move into an exclusive club. As Hamilton says, "…biography not only offers an opportunity to express ideas and tell stories in prose, but is a veritable treasure-house of fine writing."

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Sandra Dark is the author of 10 novels, not one of which contains so much as a grain of autobiographical material.