Kris Kneen, the award-winning Australian author of four memoirs, including recent release Fat Girl Dancing, shares advice from their own experience.
It is, of course, all about craft: The material is all there, the lived experiences, but putting it all together into a coherent whole for other people to read is the whole battle.How can you write more than one memoir? Haven't we only got one personal story to tell?People often think that to write a memoir they have to shove everything about themselves into one book, but this is absolutely not the best way to do it.
There are more memoirs I could write. There always are, because we have multiple facets to our personality, and every experience changes us. I could write a whole book about my relationship to my father. I could write a book about learning to ride a motorcycle and all the places that took me. I could write about the job of being a writer. I could go on.
The Guardian called Fat Girl Dancing "a fresh, vital call to arms for all those who have had a gutful of being told their body isn't good enough". I am sure I don't always get it right, but I try to be kind to everyone in my books. If someone has been awful to me and the awful thing needs to be said, I try to change the name of the person and tell the story as honestly as I can. Also, I figure if they behaved badly, then there is less chance they will put their hand up and tell people that it's them I was writing about.
I could have continued to talk about my relationship to the subject — and I had a bunch of health setbacks that would have been relevant to the text — but I needed to find the ending that would best suit the book.
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