Memoir Writing Book: Fearless Confessions by Sue William Silverman

Post #46 – Women’s Memoirs, Book Raves – Kendra Bonnett and Matilda Butler

The most insightful books about writing are also the most personal, and Sue Silverman’s Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir is no exception.

I think about my own journey as a writer–the many detours and interruptions as I pursued a career in corporate marketing and even headed a small agency for a while–and I think about the many people who dream of writing but pile up cords of excuses. Silverman’s own path to memoir, strewn with the pages of unpublished and unfinished novels, was halting and hesitant. I can’t tell my story. Who would want to read it, anyway? How humiliating!

When, finally, she sat down to write, an author was born. Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir is the story of her labor–contraction by contraction, push by push. The tale of how she gave birth to her first book,
, is as interesting (and encouraging) as her writing advice is useful.

If you plan on writing a memoir, you need to read Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. Silverman’s chapters are brief, on point, and filled with practical advice, exercises and examples. We come to understand topics (ranging from theme to voice to metaphor) just as Silverman herself mastered them. I think it’s the clarity in her own mind (and her ability to apply the lessons herself) that enables her to distill each subject into a few pages. And always she includes a takeaway sentence or two:

“Revealing a theme is more effective than announcing it.”

“A plot needs that tension established right off the bat….ask yourself: What is my ‘dark and stormy night’?”

“Your job as a writer is to take everyday things and slant them in order for them to give up their secrets.”

While it’s hard to single out one aspect of Silverman’s book that I most appreciate, and I’m fully prepared to concede to someone else’s selection, what I like best about Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir is Silverman’s experience with fiction. Throughout the book, she equates and differentiates the two genres. On the subject of plot, for example, she writes: “Plot is as important in memoir as it is in fiction. In fiction, plot is inventing; in nonfiction, it is discovered.” Ahh, I get it.

By taking Sue’s personal tour through the memoir-writing process, you’ll make your own journey that much easier. She’ll not only clear the path, but point out the best views along the way.

In advance of our interview with Sue William Silverman back in 2009, Sue wrote a guest blog for Women’s Memoir, which you can read here: “Who is that Masked Memoirist?” You can also listen to Matilda’s and my interview with Sue here.

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Tagged as: craft of writing, Memoir Book & Video Reviews, Women's Memoir Writing, Writing a memoir