In this episode of The Writing Coach podcast, writing coach Kevin T. Johns shares his thoughts on various memoirs he has enjoyed.
Kevin highlights specific memoirs and discusses what makes them memorable. He also reflects on how memoirs can provide insight into the lives of others and influence readers.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:
The Writing Coach Episode #199 Show Notes
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The Writing Coach Episode #199 Transcript
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Hello beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
Hello, Beloved listeners, and welcome back to The Writing Coach podcast. It is your host, as always, writing coach Kevin T. Johns here.
Every time I run a promotion for something like my FIRST DRAFT group coaching program and community, I get feedback from folks who say, “This looks amazing, but it’s a big-time investment, and it’s a big financial investment.” And it is because it’s targeted at professional authors, or aspiring authors looking to go professional, who really want to go all in with their writing. That is who I work with: serious writers. Well, they don’t take themselves seriously, but they take their writing seriously. That’s why it’s an intense program. (And my one-on-one work is even more intense!)
I’m often asked, “Do you have anything less time-intensive? Do you have anything super affordable?” I’ve always said “No” because I really want to work with people who make their writing a primary aspect of their lives.
That said, I’ve been rethinking things. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized not everything needs to be “all in” all the time. For some people, writing is an important part of their lives, but it’s not their whole lives; they have kids, or they have jobs, or they have other hobbies, or they have other businesses, or they have other things going on. But they still want to ensure that writing and getting better as a writer and making progress on their writing and interacting with other writers are part of their lives, just not at the forefront of it. I’ve decided those people need support as well.
I love to work with ‘all-in’ people, but shouldn’t I also offer a service for people who maybe want to make a smaller investment of either time or money? I was doing a lot of thinking about it, and I’m really excited to announce that I’m now offering a service called CRAFT CLUB.
CRAFT CLUB is a once-a-month group coaching session that goes for an hour and 15 minutes(ish). It’s going to take place on the first Saturday of every month. I’m going to provide a 30-minute writer’s craft training session, then we’re going to transition into a 30-minute open Q&A where folks can ask me anything they want about the training I’ve provided in that session or anything at all about their writing and about their books so that they can get that personalized support, help and motivation. Then, in the last 15 minutes of the call, we’ll do some goal-setting for the next month and some accountability work to say, “Hey, last month, you said you were going to do this; did you accomplish it?” And that’s it. That’s CRAFT CLUB. An hour and 15 minutes a month, you get training, you get Q&A, you get accountability and goal setting, all for a super affordable price.
This is what you folks have been asking me for, and I am giving to you: a low-time commitment, low-cost offering that is still going to give you a ton of value. Because even if you’re only spending an hour and 15 minutes a month studying your craft, thinking about your goal setting, being able to ask questions to get you over those hurdles or those road roadblocks that have been holding you up and making progress on your manuscript on your story or on whatever it is you’re working on, it’s going to be huge and make a really big difference.
Alright, I primarily work with commercial fiction authors, as you probably know, but at times I’ll work with nonfiction authors and with memoirists and the thing about memoir is virtually every craft component I teach for fiction writing applies to memoir as well. We need character arcs, we need themes, we need setting an environment and dialogue and conflict, and seeing goals and acts and sequences, and everything we talked about in fiction also applies to memoirs.
Now, where I think folks get confused sometimes is when they get autobiographies and memoirs confused. These are actually two very distinct genres. Autobiography is someone’s life story; you’re telling the whole journey of being you. Whereas a memoir is a little moment in your life. It’s a moment where something monumentally changed forever. So a memoir might just be one month, I mean, 148 hours was that what that book was called? That book was covered just like three days in that guy’s life, right? A memoir is a little moment in someone’s life, whereas an autobiography is the whole big story. Now, one of my clients who’s currently working on a memoir right now (shout out to Patty) asked me if there was any memoirs that I’ve read and what my thoughts were on them. In this week, I spent some time thinking about the genre a memoir, and thinking about what memoirs I’ve read, and that I’ve really enjoy it. I thought I’d share that with you in this episode of The Writing Coach podcast.
Now, I wanted to make sure that I always want to make sure that I’m trained up on all genres so that I can help all the writers who come to me for support. And so a couple years ago, I sought out some memoir courses, and I found one on creativelive.com, a fantastic website for training. It was being taught by Joyce Maynard Joyce Maynard wrote a memoir called At Home in the World. And after watching her course, I went out and got her book and I read her memoir, and it’s one of those life changing books because what that book is about is when Joyce Maynard was 18 years old, JD Salinger, while in his 50s, basically like groomed her and seduced her and dated her. So she was this child or 18-year-old teen, and he was an established, famous 50-year-old author. And what Maynard lays out in the book is a pretty shocking and, you know, at times disgusting perhaps experience in her life. And of course, like every reader and writer out there.
JD Salinger has always been like a hero to me. I mean, obviously, The Catcher in the Rye is great. But yes, so many other great stories as well, all the glass stories, the banana fish story is unforgettable. And so he’d always been someone I know idolized. And after reading this book, boy is sure brings him down to earth. And not only is he no longer godlike in my eyes, but he’s also clearly a fallible and perhaps terrible person. And it’s funny that, like, at this point in my life, I’m still learning that, but you know, it doesn’t take much more than going and checking out JK Rowling’s Twitter feed to see that even great artists can be horrible, despicable people. And so yeah, I mean, just add, you know, JD Salinger to the Joss Whedon and JK Rowling and the long list of artists that I have admired for a long time only to realize they’re terrible, flawed people, which is probably a good lesson to learn. And I probably learned it later in life than I should have. I mean, I think we all need to acknowledge nobody’s perfect. And just because someone creates a book that we like, or a piece of art that we like, doesn’t mean we would actually like them as a person. Interesting stuff. And so at home in the world by Joyce Maynard definitely got me thinking about heroes and hero worship and artists and all of those things. And I can certainly say it’s a book that changed my life
in terms of how I look at JD Salinger. And I’ll never look at JD Salinger the same, and that is the power of memoir.
Now my favorite memoir of all time has got to be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson was such an incredibly talented author, every line of his work, just bubbles with energy, and he’s such a unique, dynamic voice in the world of nonfiction. Though portions of fear and loathing are clearly fictionalized. I would still say it is a memoir. And I mean, that’s one of the interesting things about memoirs, right that no one’s saying it’s factual. They’re saying, This is my recollection of how things went down. And Hunter S. Thompson is the king of taking real events and making them seem larger than life through His incredible writing, which is at times hilarious at times, disturbing, at times insightful, really great stuff and not just in fear and loathing. He’s got tons of I mean, fear and loathing on the campaign trail, and 72 is another great memoir of following that political campaign. And it gives you insight into why Thompson thought Nixon was such a villain. All of Thompson’s stuff is fantastic. And because of his Gonzo style, he really inserted himself into all of his stories, which meant that so much of he wrote, what he wrote was arguably memoir. And so if you’ve never read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, or some of Thompson’s work, check it out. I mean, it’s just fantastic stuff.
Speaking of fantastic stuff, the last memoir I read, and I’ve read this just a month or two ago, is The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories. And it’s the collective memoir of the punk rock band, no effects. I like any good punk rock kid in the 90s, I grew up listening to no effects. And this memoir was just a fascinating recollection, in the band’s own words of their journey together. And the really unique thing about this book is, it’s really four books in one it alternates chapters between the four main members of the band. And so we really get these different journeys that these four different men have been on over the 30 year history of this band, or 40 years, whatever it’s been, I guess, probably, I don’t know. Yeah. 3040 years, they were out in the 80s. So you do the math, just ever really wonderfully written book as well. Actually, I went and I looked up, the the author who helped these guys write the book, his name is Jeff Alius. That’s how much I liked his stuff. Anyway, he, I think he’s a bit of a rock journalist. Like I think he did a book on the doors and some other things, but just loved what he brought to that book. Every chapter starts with a really interesting hook and ends with, you know, a nice callback or a cliffhanger or whatnot. Just you can tell that he brought a lot of form and style to this book, by working with these punk rockers to tell their story. And so if you’re interested in no effects, or if you’re interested in punk rock at all, I definitely recommend hepatitis bathtub.
Speaking of punk rock memoirs, another one I really enjoyed was How to Ru(i)n a Record Label by Larry liberal Livermore. So again, being a 90s punk kid, I was obsessed with San Francisco, East Bay and the punk rock bands coming out of that scene like Operation IV and rancid and Green Day Of course, and look at records. Larry Livermore is record label is the label that all of these pop punk bands coming out of California in the early 90s. Were on. And so this book is a really fascinating memoir about how this little tiny independent punk rock record label ended up going huge because when Green Bay signed to a major record label, lookout still had their backlog and suddenly, they had all this money pouring in and another band on that label. screeching Weasel is another incredible fantastic punk band from that area and from that era, and their lead singer is a bit of a controversial figure and he really plays the villain in that book, which is pretty interesting. So while while Green Bay is making a big screeching weasels, lead singer is trying to try to get his cut in the pie trying to get his money. Really interesting stuff. And of course, on the surface punk rock is all about rejecting capitalism and rejecting money and yet, you know, as this memoir shows, once someone gets big once money gets involved, things get very complicated hence, the title How to ruin a record label is that the cover of the book is how to run a record label and then run is crossed out and replaced with the rune. Pretty clever stuff. Again, if you’re into punk rock if you’re into pop punk, skate punk from the 90s He’s so Calpine could definitely check out how to ruin a record label.
Now, there are a couple of books. I mean probably lots of books in my life that I bought just because I liked the title. And I liked the cover art. And and so the next two memoirs I want to talk about are two memoirs that I bought, just because I saw the books at a bookstore and I loved the titles, and I loved the cover. The first one is The Disaster Artists by Greg Sestero. This is the book about the making of the cult hit worst film of all time, the room, and I had not even seen the room. When I bought this book. I was familiar with it. I knew people said it was like the worst movie ever and was like a cult hit. But I just loved the title, the disaster artist, I thought that was such an intriguing title. And then the cover of the book was a film reel. Within the film, film reel is also a bomb with a lit fuse. I just loved that title. I grabbed the book. And it’s just a fantastic memoir really about this interesting friendship that are unlikely friendship. I don’t know that that happened around the making of this, this crazy movie, the room and just an example of how people talk about book marketing and blogging and you kind of have a tick tock and blah, blah, blah, sometimes incredible, incredibly intriguing title and a cool cover give you enough for someone to pick up a book that so that’s what happened for me in the disaster artists.
And that’s also what happened for Trust Me, I’m Lying Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday. So Ryan Holiday nowadays is known as this stoic experts. So he’s written three or four books now I believe on stoicism that have been big hits. But I just saw Trust Me, I’m Lying. I loved the title. And I loved the cover, it had this kind of like, noir badass looking cover. And so I grabbed Ryan holidays memoir. It’s a book about marketing. In the earlier days of the internet, I guess this would have been like web, maybe early 2.0 or web one even. But it was a fascinating introduction to me about how the internet really worked. Back in those days anyway, just in terms of clicks and click bait and how traffic is controlled or manipulated. And, you know, some fun interesting stuff in there too, about how the mass media can be manipulated by by marketers, and by people trying to promote things. So really interesting, kind of behind the scenes insight into the world of internet marketing a couple decades ago at least, and just really interesting to see that Ryan Holiday has gone on to be this kind of moralistic teacher of stoicism. Whereas his first book was kind of about like being shady and manipulating people kind of interesting.
I gotta give a shout out to writing core coach Lauren Cipolla. She’s a friend of mine, and she has a fantastic memoir called Between the Shadow and Lo. It’s a trilogy, I believe, and that’s the first one in the trilogy. And it’s about her time as a writer, but it’s also about her time as a hardcore alcoholic and what life is like when you’re dealing with addiction. Very much kind of in the style of perhaps entendres Thompson. It’s sometimes shocking, sometimes hilarious, sometimes dark, a really fantastic read. So if you want to read a great memoir from a writing coach who’s out there, working with authors right now go check out between the shadow and low by Lauren spell.
It’s something I probably have not talked about on the podcast as much as other things. I don’t know why I guess like Star Wars comes up more than in or something. But for a long, long time, I was hugely obsessed with comic books and graphic storytelling of all kinds. And while when it comes to comic books, most people think superheroes and I’m certainly a huge superhero fan. There’s also a really, really kind of excellent genre of memoir, or tradition, I guess of memoir, storytelling in graphic novels.
The most famous or most successful is probably Fun Home by Alison Bechdel.
You probably know Bechdel, from the Bechdel test. That’s the test where you watch a movie or you read a book and you say the two women Talk to each other in this work. And if they do talk to each other, do they talk about something other than men. Kind of a fun, interesting feminist technique that you can use to see whether your story is utterly biased towards me male characters or not. But Fun Home is kind of a breakthrough graphic novel that that went mainstream and is a memoir.
My favorite memoir in the graphic novel format is probably Blankets by Craig Thompson. It’s a masterpiece of the genre of not just the genre of graphic novel memoirs, but graphic novels in general. It’s just about a teenage romance and about Thompson dealing with religion, dealing with growing up in a Christian family and sex and romance and love, like basically puberty coming of age stuff. And how do you come of age, well wrapped up in the cloak of religion and all of the kind of suppression that comes along with that, beautifully written beautifully illustrated, huge, just a real kind of epic masterpiece that I highly recommend anyone check out. Personally, I think it’s much better than Fun Home. But Fun Home is definitely the breakout one. Whereas Blankets, I don’t think anyone other than comic book people would really know about it. But it’s, it’s so good.
There is there’s another great one called Epileptic by David B that I really enjoyed.
And then there’s a group of memoir writing or writing and illustrating cartoonists largely centered in Toronto here in Canada. And so that’s the group of Joe, Matt, Seth and Chester Brown. These guys have all become super successful in their own rights. But they’ve all also done some fantastic memoir pieces in the graphic novel format. Chester brown these days is probably best known for his super successful graphic novel on Louis Riel. But he’s done some great memoir stuff. Paying for It, I think, is his most recent memoir piece. And it’s about his experiences paying for prostitutes. He made the decision at some point in his life that he wasn’t going to pursue romantic relationships anymore and was just instead going to hire sex workers. So pretty fascinating piece.
Speaking of sex, Joe, Matt’s last book Spent is again a memoir, and it’s about his addiction to pornography. And this entire memoir is basically just him in this one room, watching pornography and masturbating. I know it’s a very strange sounding memoir. And it is a strange memoir, but it’s also kind of heartbreaking and touching and sad, very, very sad piece. And unfortunately, Joe Matt died recently he was in his 50s I think and had a heart attack. So he was a very talented, strange, weird cartoonist who who told his his most private and intimate embarrassing moments via memoir in in the graphic novel format, so definitely interesting dude and sad to see him go.
Probably the best of the bunch of the of the Chester Brown, Seth, Joe, Matt triumphant. The best piece coming out that I would think probably is It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken by Seth, just a real powerful, melancholy graphic novel memoir from Canadian cartoonist Seth.
Brian Michael Bendis is the creator of Miles Morales, the ultimate Spider-Man the Spider-Man from The Into the Spider-Verse films, massive Spider-Man character who’s very popular these days he was invented by Brian Michael Bendis. But Brian Michael Bendis came out of the in the publishing world, the indie comics world that that those other guys I just mentioned kind of came out of. And so once he was kind of big in the comic book world like the mainstream superhero comic book world, he published this memoir called Fortune and Glory about going to Hollywood and trying to pitch his material to Hollywood and just kind of a really insightful view into an independent artist trying to go and make it in Hollywood. And of course, the great irony is that now his character Miles Morales is the star of these huge smash hit into the spider verse films and so obviously Brian Michael Bendis did make it ultimately In Hollywood, but it’s interesting to see the Fortune and glory and his story of kind of failure and disappointment in Hollywood prior to ultimately being quite successful.
The last of these graphic novel memoirists that I’ll mention is Harvey Pekar’s work. He’s best known for his American Splendor comics. Here’s another piece called The Quitter, another piece and several. actual memoirs of his are quite excellent, and you can’t really mention memoir and like kind of real-life comic book stuff without mentioning P car. He was the one who pioneered it all. And you can see his story his kind of life story his his memoir kind of adapted into the film American splendor that tells the story of his life and his work.
I am a huge, huge Bob Dylan fan. I there was a time where like, all I did was watch movies about Bob Dylan listened to Bob Dylan music and read books about Bob Dylan, I probably have a dozen books about Bob Dylan on my bookshelf. And so when Chronicles came out, that’s his memoir, you can bet I snap that up right away. And as you know, Bob Dylan has been doing for the second half of his career. It’s kind of a frustrating read. He just picks some kind of random times in his life and explores them. So like a part of the book takes place with him first arriving in New York and, and getting famous in the folk scene in Greenwich Village, which is like what you’d expect, right? But then the other part of the book is this covering the making of a album in the very early 70s. That’s like, a pretty forgettable album. It’s not like one of his big famous albums whatsoever. I mean, it is now because one of the songs is the song from, I believe the opening sequence of The Big Lebowski. So you know, it’s probably kind of gotten a bit more acclaim as times gone by Bayway. You know, you want to hear about him making Blonde on Blonde, you want to hear about him making Blood on the Tracks you want to hear about making, you know, the big ones and instead he picks a small album to talk about the making of and so classic Dylan kind of giving and take you away at the same time.
Speaking of Dylan, his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, so she was dating him during the very earliest years of his career, where he was really starting to become famous. And there’s a bunch of songs inspired by her in those early albums that are basically about Susie. And Susie went on to write her own memoir. So her memoir is called A Freewheelin’ Time. And of course, it does touch on her relationship with Bob Dylan, and then what it was like being around him, but it’s actually more focused on her political activism at that time, she was highly involved in in the human rights movement. And she actually goes to Cuba at one point as a young lady as a teen I think, for political reasons to promote stuff.
And so anyway, really interesting view into the world that Bob Dylan was kind of coming out of it’s, it’s not necessarily I mean, Bob Dylan, certainly a character in the book and plays a large part. But when I think back to that memoir, I more think about Rotolo is politics and then protests she went to and events and whatnot.
One of the first memoirs probably I ever read was Last Train to Alcatraz by Leon Thompson. The reason I read that book was because my dad lived in San Francisco for a little while in the 90s when all the cool punk stuff was going on there. And I went to visit him and we went to Alcatraz Of course, what do you do when you’re in San Francisco, you go to Alcatraz prison, and you check it out.
And while we were there, I think Leon Thompson, who had been a prisoner in Alcatraz, was there signing copies of his memoir and so I actually got to meet the author and got him to sign my book and went home as a young teen and read what it was like being a prisoner in Alcatraz prison. Pretty cool read and always cool to have the author’s signature at the front of a book when you’re reading it.
I think the last memoir I’ll mention here is The Game by Neil Strauss, which is just a fascinating deep dive into this weird fringe subculture of pickup artists in the late 90s. Or perhaps its early 2000s. A lot of literature is About subcultures, it’s about exploring the the outskirts of society, right? Like things aren’t always that interesting in the mainstream.
And so these books where characters go and explore different worlds and different subcultures can be really fascinating. And Neil Strauss is just an incredible writer. He’s a fantastic writer. And the game is this really interesting exploration of these, this pickup artist subculture, but it’s also a bit of a gone native story. So these stories, like Dances with Wolves, right, where where a character goes out into the wilderness, and then as an outsider, and then is ultimately like, adopted into that culture. That’s what the game is a little bit about Neil Strauss, he goes to explore this subculture and ultimately becomes a part of it. And in Well, I think he tells himself, he’s there for journalistic reasons. But I think you can, you can pick up that he basically went all in with the culture for a time and became a different person.
And so just a super well written super fascinating insight into this creepy world of pickup artists, which is probably perhaps, where the seeds of Insell comes from. And, you know, I suspect, you know, when the pickup artist, job like subculture crashed and burned, because it was all nonsense, for the most part, a lot of those young men probably became frustrated in sales. And so, you know, just again, interesting insight views into parts of society that we don’t always see it in the world.
That’s what memoir is all about, at the end of the day, right? It’s an insight into someone else’s life. And sometimes, it’s a fascinating insight, because it’s so much unlike our own lives. And other times, it’s, it’s fascinating, it draws us in, because we say that’s just like me, I went through something like that, or I’m going through something like that, right, or I’m going to go through something like that. And this author got through it, this author went through some massive personal change of some kind and came out on the other side, ready to tell their story, and usually to help others via that story.
And so that’s why memoir is such a fascinating genre. And that’s why it was really fun to sit down and think about some of the memoirs that I’ve really enjoyed and that have has left a lasting effect on me, and that I can kind of just sit down and think about the drop of the hat.
What memories do you like, I’d love to hear what some of your favorite memoirs are. Shoot me an email at kevin (AT) kevintjohs.com. And tell me about some of your favorite memoirs so that I can continue to share these book recommendations on a future episode of the show.
That is it for this episode. Thank you so much for tuning in.
Don’t forget that the first session of CRAFT CLUB is going to take place on May 4, 2024. That’s just a week away, so now is the time to get signed up for my new low-time investment, low-financial investment, high-reward program. Get in there, ask questions, learn your craft, and do some goal-setting and accountability work. Make your writing an important aspect of your life on a monthly basis without making a huge financial investment.
Hit that subscribe button because next episode is a big one. It’s episode 200 Coming at you next week. I will see you there on that episode of The Writing Coach.
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