Salon.com > Lauren Slater

Salon’s guide to writing a memoir

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 23:00:00 +0000

It’s a genre that critics love to bag on, and readers love to devour. But we like to think that it’s not bad to write a memoir, it’s just very hard to write a good one. So we asked 10 of our favorite first-person authors for their best advice on the form. Get ready to take notes, gaze at your navel -- and learn from the masters.

Anne Lamott (“Operating Instructions,” “Grace, Eventually,” “Help, Thanks, Wow”):

The most important advice I could give to aspiring memoir writers is that it's pretty much all hopeless. There is very little chance that you will get your memoir published by a mainstream publisher (or, for that matter, your novel). Also, if you do get published, the process will make you way more mental than you already are. Plus, almost no one makes a great living as a writer. You have to be willing to take a real job, to finance your writing life. I cleaned houses and taught tennis lessons on the one court in Bolinas, Calif., for most of my 20s. Before that, I worked as a clerk typist at Bechtel, and as an assistant at a magazine.

“The $60,000 Dog”: Animal attraction

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 22:00:00 +0000

To judge by recent publishing trends, the great proliferation of authors these days can be attributed to the animals — sometimes cats, occasionally the odd duck, but mostly dogs, and badly behaved ones at that — who go around saving their lives. These rescues, alas, consist of nothing so exciting as pulling the writer from a burning building or arriving in the midst of a blizzard carrying a little wooden barrel of brandy. Instead, the wayward pooches and mischievous felines stick to figurative life-saving — in the form of teaching the author to open his heart to love again or to embrace familial responsibility or to appreciate the beauties of the imperfect.

A desire to avoid this tedious (but by no means flagging) genre might keep some readers from Lauren Slater's new book, a linked collection of autobiographical essays about the relationship between people and animals. Two signals that this one is something different: the title, "The $60,000 Dog: My Life With Animals," which (rightly) suggests that Slater will be getting at some of the more difficult and ambiguous aspects of America's pet fixation, and Slater's track record. She has published six books, all but one of them nonfiction, and in each one she excavates the prickliest roots of subjects such as anti-depressants, pregnancy, psychological experiments, mental illness and the unreliability of the memoir form itself. "Okay, girls," says a drill-sergeant-like riding instructor at a camp she attended as a girl, "Slater has one of her typical profound and provocative questions." Yes she does; she always does.

I love my dog as much as my child

Sat, 10 Nov 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Although he is usually a kind man, a man, we now know, who lets his children race their tiny cars around the road ring called his bald spot, my husband nevertheless insists, as he always has, that an animal’s worth is roughly equivalent to its edibility. If you can carve, slice, boil, or bake the beast, then it is generally welcome in our home, packaged and frozen or live and wild; but if the animal presents no potential for consumption of the gastrointestinal sort, then in my husband’s mind the life form is an excess weight on the world, an evolutionary glitch that serves no purpose except to clutter our already jam-packed planet.