Zinsser's memoir recommendations

2020-02-10

I listened to the audio collection of William Zinsser's On Writing Well. It's broken into two parts. It's an abridged version of his book by the same name, followed by a lecture on memoir writing. In the second lecture he discusses lots of different types of memoirs, and emphasises that you should read other people's memoirs in the quest to find your own unique voice for your story.

I don't want to write a memoir, and I was only looking for a good recap of the principles that he outlined in On Writing Well. But, his discussions of the different memoirs in the second lecture piqued my interest because a lot of them sounded interesting.

Zinsser's list of recommended books is at the end of the lecture. These are:

• Angela's Ashes: A Memoir, by Frank McCourt
• Growing Up, by Russell Baker
• The Road from Coorain, by Jill Ker Conway
• Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, by Vladimir Nabokov
• Fierce Attachments, by Vivian Gornick
• A Cab At The Door, by V. S. Pritchett
• Naples '44: A World War II Diary of Occupied Italy, by Norman Lewis
• A Drinking Life: A Memoir, by Pete Hamill
• The Liars' Club: A Memoir, by Mary Karr
• This Boy's Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff
• Five Boyhoods, by Harry Golden, Walt Kelly, Howard Lindsay, John Updike and William K. Zinsser
• An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard
• Out of Egypt, by Andre Aciman
• The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston
• Ornament and Silence: Essays on Women's Lives, by Kennedy Fraser
• Virgin Time, by Patricia Hampl
• Poets in Their Youth: A Memoir, by Eileen Simpson
• Colored People: A Memoir, by Henry Louis Gates Jr
• A Walker in the City, by Alfred Kazin
• One Writer's Beginnings, by Eudora Welty
• Family, by Ian Frazie
• Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust
• Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, by William Zinsser