Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of memoir. Truthfully, I’ve always been drawn to memoir, but recently I’ve started reading with a more critical eye. I’m not just reading for the story anymore. I’m paying attention to where the story starts to lose me, the parts where I find myself skimming or getting impatient, just wanting to return to the narrative that actually holds my attention.
I’ve also been learning to give myself permission not to finish books. Even more, I’m now allowing myself to write about books I don’t like. That part is tricky. I don’t want to write negative reviews, especially when my lack of engagement doesn’t necessarily mean the book is bad. More often than not, it just means the book isn’t for me. The author hasn’t failed, I’m simply not the intended audience.
Take Winter in the City of Light by Sue Harper. I thought it might be interesting, but I couldn’t get through it. I kept waiting for something to pull me in, but it never came. If you love art galleries or know the streets of Paris, this book might be a treasure. But that’s not me. I don’t have a strong connection to Paris, and the many references to specific streets and galleries lost me. It felt like walking through a city I didn’t know, without a guide.
What did I learn from that? That place-specific detail needs context. When I write about cycling through Thailand, I don’t need to list every street name. In Italy, I don’t need to name the highways. The narrative doesn’t hinge on those details. They may be vivid to me, but they aren’t always meaningful to the reader. I need to be mindful of when I’m venturing into unnecessary detail, and consider whether it’s helping or hindering the story I want to tell.
Then there was I Felt the End Before It Came by Daniel Allen Cox. I did make it to the end of that one, although I skimmed through a few chapters. It focused heavily on grievances with the Jehovah’s Witness church. The weight of those grievances alone didn’t carry the narrative for me. The life stories were compelling in moments, but they lacked cohesion. There wasn’t enough reflection or connective tissue to give the book a strong sense of wholeness. The stories sat beside each other rather than building into something larger.
Again, I ask myself, what can I learn from this? It reminds me of why I structured my first memoir around themes drawn from my PhD research. The thematic analysis helped me identify the core ideas, and that in turn helped me choose which blog posts to include. Even though I don’t name those themes in the book, their presence gave the memoir depth and direction. Without them, it might have felt like a loosely connected set of journal entries.
That’s where I’m stuck right now with the memoirs I’m working on. The pieces feel more like essays or personal reflections than part of a greater whole. They haven’t quite come together as a cohesive book. At least not yet. But I know they will. What I need now is to step back and look at them with a different lens, one that can reveal the bigger picture and help me shape these fragments into something fuller.
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