This book is okay- there were some things I jotted down in my 'Writer Refs' notebook. But I can't honestly say it 'pulled me in.' ( )

"The worst story we can tell ourselves is that we are alone."

Melanie Brooks is trying to write a memoir about her father, who died of HIV due to an infected blood transfusion. Finding it difficult to approach a subject that was so personal and so painful, she began to seek out the wisdom of memoirists who had written about their own painful stories and shared them with the world. These interviews comprise the heart of this book, which unveils the process of juggling hard memories with the craft of writing a good story, how to tell one's personal truth, how to deal with the reactions afterward, and how sharing one's own specific story can connect with reader remind them and the author that they are not alone in their experiences after all.

For those wishing to start or continue writing a memoir, then this book might be a balm, a reminder that it can be done, providing insight into the processes of some masters of the craft.

For fans of memoirs, the book provides a backdoor look into how many of these amazing stories were written and the impact it had on the author's lives.

For me, this provided both while also increasing my TBR list, because dang if there's not a bunch of these memoirs that I need to read. ( )

I really wanted to like this book, and there were things in it that were very likeable: interviews with a mix of well-known and virtually unknown (to me) memoirists meant that I discovered new memoirs I might want to read but also got insight into the back story of memoirs I've already read. The quality of the book varied with the quality of the interview, with some of the sections offering pretty interesting insights like that of Andre Dubus III: "what distinguishes decent writing from good writing and good writing from great writing is just how rigorous the writer was in his or her curiosity, just how authentic and sincere they were. In the A-plus books, the writer went to the bottom of the experience and what did he or she find? More bottomlessness. There are no answers, there are only questions."

On the down side, the interviewer/author's wide-eyed, incredulous demeanor is off-putting. She rarely offers anything beyond the interview itself. The tension that is supposed to animate the series of interviews and connect them together - her attempt to write her own "hard story" - ends up not being compelling enough and not integrated thoroughly enough, often relegated to a short paragraph at the end of the chapter.

Overall, this was an interesting idea carried out in a way that was too formulaic. ( )

It isn't hard to write a book about people who wrote hard stories. You just have to travel a bit and interview the authors. "Was it hard to write hard stories?" you ask them all. "Yes, it was hard," they all say. And that is your book. And that is this book. ( )

Actual Rating: 3.5

I actually really liked this when I started it. It was eye-opening, and as a writer myself, I thought that the advice I learned was so important. It talked about allowing yourself to feel, and coming to terms with the truth - both for yourself and for everyone around you.

This book was insightful, but as I read on I felt like it started to become repetitive: every chapter was essentially saying the same thing. I feel like if I had a deeper understanding of each of the interviewed authors - maybe an excerpt depicting their writing and emotion, each chapter would've felt more personal and more different. We did get a glimpse - several paragraphs describing what each author's memoir was about, but by the time we got to the 'advice' portion, it was just too easy to forget.

Other than that, Brooks' writing style itself was engaging, and I actually really loved how she tied together the authors' writing with her own writing, with ours, the readers. It shows just how powerful books can be - how it encourages the sharing of stories, which, is what this book is really all about. ( )