Hey, I have a six-word memoir in Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure the new book from SMITH Magazine (yes, the same SMITH that publishes my husband Josh’s A.D.)
Not Quite What I Was Planning originated from a contest SMITH held with Twitter last year, inspired by a possibly apocryphal tale of Ernest Hemingway’s six-word short story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” The pieces ultimately chosen for the book are a good mix of the silly, absurd, straightforward, sentimental, and ironic (lots of those). Mine is “Suburban Girl Tries to Make Bad” (p.152). Okay, so I fictionalized the setting somewhat, but my purpose was noble: to reveal, as any good memoir does, the deeper emotional truth. (That’s what they all say, no?) Josh is in there too: “When she proposed, I said yes.” No fiction in that. Other contributors include Sebastian Junger, Aimee Mann, Dave Eggers, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Flynn, Stephen Colbert, Jonathan Lethem, Amy Sedaris.
The book’s been getting tons of press, including an excellent interview with co-editors Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser on NPR’s “Talk of The Nation.”
The New Yorker even wrote a Talk of the Town about it–composed all in six-word sentences.
Forgive my bias when I say the book isn’t just a novelty piece. It feels trenchant. There is something haunting in the brevity of these mini-memoirs and in the inevitable self-interrogation they inspire–after reading it for awhile, you will start to naturally compose six-word sentences about yourself.
Oh, and go ahead and submit your pithy memoir to sixwordmemoir.com — a sequel is already in the works.
