by Virginia Lloyd | Oct 2, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing
When you have a literary crush on a writer, going to see him or her at a live event is a fraught undertaking. There’s always the chance that my reader’s fantasy, gleaned over hours of intimate and silent time spent in the author’s company, will be...
by Virginia Lloyd | Sep 28, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Memoir, Young Widow's Book of Home Improvement
I discovered Gail Caldwell’s first book, the memoir A Strong West Wind, in a rare moment of serendipitous book-buying in an old-fashioned bookstore. Reading other people’s memoirs that year while writing my own, I selected A Strong West Wind because I was...
by Virginia Lloyd | Aug 28, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing
Geoff Dyer’s latest column for the New York Times Book Review has encouraged me to come clean about my patterns of reading and book-buying. Dyer – whom Zadie Smith has called “a national treasure” for his “acute and bad-tempered”...
by Virginia Lloyd | Aug 18, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing
A while ago I wrote my first book review for The Australian, on two books about Facebook. Although David Kirkpatrick’s corporate biography The Facebook Effect had been out for some time, Daniel Miller’s anthropological Tales From Facebook had only just...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jul 26, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Memoir
This is the cover of the new edition of the Griffith Review, “Such is Life”, which arrived in my Brooklyn mailbag yesterday and will be available on August 1. I am thrilled to be a contributor to this memoir-themed issue, which features the fine company of...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jul 18, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Memoir
I’ve noticed a lot of people arriving on my blog after searching for tips about word count in memoir. I wrote about this some time ago but feel the need to clarify a few points. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were some magic number of words per...