# Writing Life Stories

## Metadata
- Author: [[Bill Roorbach]]
- Full Title: Writing Life Stories
- Category: #books
## Highlights
- (a semester is a bureaucratic unit, not a creative one), ([Location 165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005C5TKDG&location=165))
- A memoir is a true story, a work of narrative built directly from the memory of its writer, with an added element of creative research. ([Location 293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005C5TKDG&location=293))
- Information is almost never the first goal of memoir; expression often is. Beauty—of form, of language, of meaning—always takes precedence over mere accuracy, truth over mere facts. The successful memoirist respects facts, uses them accurately, rigorously represses the human impulse to lie or embellish, but knows that truth is both different from facts and greater than facts, and not always their sum. ([Location 304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005C5TKDG&location=304))
- To me, the first goal, the first excellence, is artistic. The needs of other excellences, such as mere accuracy, must follow the needs of drama in a kind of hierarchy that helps me make decisions as I write. ([Location 365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005C5TKDG&location=365))
- But always, the reader becomes a stand-in for the I, and the life of the I becomes the life of the reader, so no matter who is speaking, the successful true story is always the reader’s story on some level. ([Location 379](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005C5TKDG&location=379))
- To have a voice is to have a self, and to have a self is powerful. ([Location 398](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B005C5TKDG&location=398))