The authors of the four memoirs overcame their childhood obstacles by bonding with their families. Gary Soto’s family helped him accept working in the fields. Laurence Yep’s father helped him realize that he was loved all along. Barack Obama’s doesn’t fit in but his father helps him through it. Julia Alvarez is leaving a dangerous country and her family helps her through.…
Patricia Hampl’s “Memory and Imagination” provides a coherent insight about what a memoir consist of. Hampl begins to explain that a memoir is “a matter of transcription,” meaning that one has the power to present what details they choose to share. As a memoirist, you soon begin to question whether your memory is a reliable source or if your mind filled those empty gaps with desirous details. However, those memories that we simply remember must have been part of a life-changing moment that was not apparent to us at that moment. Although one intended goal could be accuracy, writing a memoir could help one discover what they know compare to the assumption of what happened.…
Authors often write about their past experiences, whether traumatic and nightmarish or exciting and mostly normal. Writing can become therapeutic and be clarifying to authors because they get to show a side of themselves and pour out their emotions to an audience. In his memoir Night, Elie Wiesel tells his story about the experiences, exposure, and cruelty he endured during the Holocaust to divulge the theme of man’s inhumanity to man. At a time when most people should be enjoying becoming young adults, Wiesel’s journey took a horrific turn.…
Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home is a work that founded on conflicts and paradoxes between outward appearance and meaning. Even the title Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic appears incomprehensible. The phrase “Fun Home” all the same for first Family funeral home, that evidently is not something, a number of us would consider being fun. We tend to contemplate the phase “Fun Home” in relevancy the family’s actual house; it is clear that their family life is not notably fun with its upsides of matrimonial conflict and therefore the emotional distance of her father. Even the nature of her book is literary object incomprehensible.…
Lamott relates to her audience and other writers alike by revealing her own experiences with these similar feelings. First drafts remain an essential starting aspect of the writing process that everyone must undergo. Audiences who read Lamott’s essay will agree that it teaches readers to be more excepting of their own writing and thus confident in what they…
I spent more and more time emulating my grandfather as an oral historian, bombarding my mother with verbose accounts of daily adolescent life. However, as my social life suffered from a lack of interpersonal confidence, I channeled more and more of my imaginative thoughts onto paper. Rarely did I have the time to compose a fully fleshed-out story; instead, I recalled the poetic beauty of my great-grandfather’s broken English and jotted my thoughts into journals full of lilting stanzas that I shared frequently during Poetry Club at my first high school. Then, at Mission Vista High, I found even more opportunities to flaunt my virtues as an author and storyteller.…
“Don’t be sorry for the truth. A harsh truth is less damaging than a tender lie, and the worst lies are the ones we tell ourselves.” In the story, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and the article, “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, both main characters are poised as hero’s. In The Giver, Jonas is selected as the receiver of memory. After many months of training, Jonas’s realizes that there is more beyond what he has learned in his community.…
Frederick Bailey, now referred to as Frederick Douglass is my grandson. He wrote a narrative of his life in 1845, discussing what life was like as an American slave. Within the personal narrative, Douglass expressed life from his perspective and from what he believed it to be. He also described his lack of knowledge about his background, stating that he didn’t actually know his birthday, age, nor father. In addition, Frederick had never had a real relationship with his mother and he was around ten when she died.…
The texts The End of Remembering by Joshua Foer and “The Ordinary Devoted Mother” by Alison Bechdel, while are stylistically very different, addresses the same themes of the memory and one’s self-identity. Foer, while not as cold or detached as a scientific paper, uses a more formal and traditional tone when compared to Bechdel who approaches these themes through the lens of a graphic novel. The result of this gives two very distinct perspective on how memories affect one’s self identity. Foer’s theoretical framework of how memory functions and Bechdel’s more anecdotal approach of the effects of her personal memories on her life, provides two very distinctive perspectives on how the prioritization of memories are connected with the creation…
Chapter two will explore the importance of Dana becoming intimately knowledgeable about the past and the people who existed during that time period. Using trauma theory, I will navigate how the physical and emotional pain that Dana endures causes her to become less disconnected and changes her mentality about the past, which enables her to become more connected with her ancestors. This connection is key because without she would be unable to narrate the novel on behalf of her ancestors without it being colored by her own twentieth century prejudices. In addition to becoming more connected with the past, this chapter will explore the importance of who can be an ideal authorial voice. I explore the way that Kevin is unable to narrate on behalf…
Everybody goes through at least one traumatic experience in their lifetime. Katherine Philips, the writer of “On the Death of My First and Dearest Child, Hector Philips”, and Frances Burney, the writer of “Mastectomy” are no exceptions. One way to deal with the grief that comes along with such traumatic experiences is to write about it. Philips deals with the grief of losing her son through writing a poem. Burney also deals with her grief, but by writing about her mastectomy in the form of a short story.…
A few weeks ago the 2017 Nobel Prize winner in literature was announced. Ishiguro was awarded the prize because of his literatures ability to sway our perceptions of time, life, and emotion in a way that connects us with the world around us. Though I haven't viewed the full extent of his works, I have seen the movie rendition of his story, “Never Let me Go”. “Never Let me Go” challenged the way I viewed memory and time. Within the movie, the main characters are separated for many years.…
Her method of writing strengthens her story and allows reflection on her past. Griffin writes, “Often I have looked back into my past with a new insight only to find that some old, hardly recollected feeling fits into a larger pattern of meaning” (234). Throughout the essay Griffin refers back to her past and allows new messages in certain paragraphs. These paragraphs often convey messages which allow readers to feel connected. This writing method introduces how she is as an author and how she allows others to feel as if they can imagine and understand the story.…
In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley talks about a monster, who transforms from an innocent individual to an evil person at the end. The entire story revolves around the monster and his creator, who abandons the monster at the time of monster’s creation. Furthermore, the society rejects the monster and this rejection changes the harmless being to a harmful creature. Thus, Shelly comments on the idea of human nature being learned and not innate through her tale of the monster. I strongly believe Mary Shelley’s portrayal of the monster in the story depicts human transformation based on their experience in the society.…
A memoir is considered a unique autobiography, which includes a public synopsis of the author’s life, including true experiences of the author. The events chosen to relate are used to connect with the purpose of the book. As the author questions what happened on their journey in life. The author comes to a clear understanding, or clearly understands the lesson learned by it. The author depicts how he/…