Greenburgh Public Library Blog

What is a Memoir?

Reading Tara Westover's memoir Educated last year, I was inspired by the author's triumphs and academic achievements despite the odds stacked against her. Usually an avid fiction reader, I reluctantly listened to my sister's recommendation of this memoir and took out a copy. Memoirs? I'm usually not interested! However, it was a memoir I could not put down, wonderfully well written - Tara Westover takes you on her journey. I know I'm enjoying a book when I can't stop thinking about the characters and can't wait to get back to reading. 

 As of January 2020, Educated has spent 97 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list.  

As Alec MacGillis wrote in the New York Times regarding Educated: "Westover has somehow managed not only to capture her unsurpassably exceptional upbringing, but to make her current situation seem not so exceptional at all, and resonant for many others. She is but yet another young person who left home for an education, and views the family she left across an uncomprehending ideological canyon, and isn't going back." 

Yet not everyone agrees on her recollections of childhood, including her parents attorney, Blake Atkin: “Tara’s parents are disappointed Tara would write a book that maligns them, their religion, their country, and homeschooling,” he said. Although “there’s a little germ of truth,” in “Educated,” the book falsely portrays the Westover family, Atkin said.Tara Westover's engaging memoir focuses on how she learned to cope with her survivalist Mormon family to go to college. Ms. Westover details her isolated life in the mountains of Idaho to getting into the PhD program at Cambridge University. She describes the personal struggle of having no formal education to suddenly being enrolled at Brigham Young University at the age of seventeen; as well as her struggles to fit into the world her father created for her and the world beyond the mountains.

What about your story? 

In her latter years my grandmother wrote in longhand on nine yellow legal size papers (back and front), describing her work as a nurse in the 1930s, and as a young married woman. I treasure those pages because they are handwritten by her, and now that she's been gone almost 30 years it's a way to remember her work, her life, and her purpose. 

You might be interested in writing down your memories.Today there are many options to publish your work, and to share it with friends and family. Seeing the interest and hoping to form a new group of writers, I am starting a new memoir writing group called the GPL Writers Community: Memoir Writing on Wednesday, March 25 at 1:30 p.m. 

What exactly is a memoir?  

An author writing a memory or selection of memories from personal knowledge or resources. 

Writing and sharing memories can help celebrate a life or it may upset others who don't share in that same narrative. 

Oprah Winfrey selected the memoir "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey for her Book Club in 2005. In 2006 the author had admitted that the same "demons" that had led him down the path of addiction had let him exaggerate the truth of his recollections. Shortly after the bombshell news broke- the Brooklyn Public Library re-cataloged the book as fiction. 

An autobiography is a timeline of one's life, contrasting with a memoir which usually focuses more in depth on a specific timeframe in the subject's life and has verified sources of information. 

The Greenburgh Public Library has many notable memoirs such as : 

• I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain 
• The Color of Water by James McBride
• Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt 
• Becoming by Michelle Obama 

Above is just a brief mention of the variety of memoirs available in the Greenburgh Public Library's print collection. Remember you can also check our eBook collection for a memoir to download to your Kindle, iPad, or any other device. You can always call us at 914-721-8225 to let us know if you are interested in memoirs and need a recommendation.