Description

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For anyone who enjoys reading memoirs—or is thinking about writing one—this collection offers a master class from nine distinguished authors, including Annie Dillard, Frank McCourt, and others.

The events, memories, and emotions of the past often resist the orderly structure of a book. Inventing the Truth offers wisdom from nine notable memoirists about their process (Ian Frazier searched through generations of family papers to understand his parents' lives), the hurdles they faced (Annie Dillard tackles the central dilemma of memoir: what to put in and what to leave out), and the unexpected joys of bringing their pasts to the page.

Featured authors include Russell Baker on Growing Up; Jill Ker Conway on The Road from Coorain; Annie Dillard on An American Childhood; Ian Frazier on Family; Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Colored People; Alfred Kazin on A Walker in the City; Frank McCourt on Angela's Ashes; Toni Morrison on Beloved; and Eileen Simpson on Poets in Their Youth.

About the Author

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Toni Morrison was a master storyteller. Her groundbreaking novel Beloved won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In 1993 she became the first black woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Alfred Kazin has lectured and taught at many prestigious universities in both the U.S. and Europe. His books include A Walker in the City, The Inmost Leaf, and Starting Out in the Thirties.