by Virginia Lloyd | May 22, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Young Widow's Book of Home Improvement
That we have all survived literary blogger Maud Newton’s 40th birthday – it fell on the same day as the rapture that wasn’t – is no excuse for you not to read her fabulous piece in The Awl about that coincidence. To celebrate our survival, I...
by Virginia Lloyd | May 12, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Memoir
Joyce Carol Oates has responded to Julian Barnes’s review of her memoir, A Widow’s Story, in a letter to the editor in the current edition of the New York Review of Books. In “For Sorrow There is No Remedy”, Barnes read carefully and responded...
by Virginia Lloyd | Apr 30, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Memoir
This week, publishing expert and Writers Digest blogger Jane Friedman published this list of useful resources for people writing memoir. When I finally got around to clicking through it – this morning – one particular article led to a minor epiphany in the...
by Virginia Lloyd | Apr 15, 2011 | Blog, Memoir
Though I was among those who thought I had said in public all I want to say about grief, a spate of new publications on the subject has challenged my silence. All I’m doing in this post is listing the three books I want to inhale immediately, and why. (I’m...
by Virginia Lloyd | Apr 1, 2011 | Blog, Memoir
If you haven’t read anything by Elif Batuman, do yourself a favour – immediately borrow (or better, buy) a copy of her 2010 National Book Critics Circle-nominated The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them. This erudite,...
by Virginia Lloyd | Mar 28, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Memoir
Writing teacher and author Lynette Benton, who writes the much-visited Polish and Publish blog, recently asked me for my thoughts on the differences between memoir and family history. While the question was prompted by a student asking for clarification during one of...