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The first memoir I remember reading was The Diary of Anne Frank. I found it, a tattered hardcover with brown pages, in the discontinued bin at the library. Nobody would be taking this one out again, they must've had a shinier version. Which was probably why I liked it all the more.

I didn't know that this one book would change my life and I didn't know what a memoir was. I knew what a diary was because I wrote in one at night and I remember being fascinated that someone's diary had been on a library shelf. Why? What was so special about this Anne Frank's life? My diary never seemed to have that kind of glitter. Naive little thing I was, because it wasn't glitter that gave it such an honorary position in someone else's hands. It was the hope and the devastation it offered. Although not of that magnitude or importance, my diary had elements like that, too.

After devouring The Diary of Anne Frank I searched for more, I wanted so much more. I found Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings; Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa; Homer Hickman's Rocket Boys: A Memoir; Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted; Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes; Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jell; Richard Wright's Black Boy. I became absolutely and obsessively in love with the soft and severe confessional nature of memoir writing. I went through a spell of feeling that fiction was an obscenity, an insult, when there was so much truth to be discovered and read.

Perhaps I favor a true account over an imaginative story because much of my own writing is of a memoir type. Maybe my writing is not entirely fascinating or heart breaking, or even heart warming. Perhaps my life is bland, has had no real value thus far. But, inside, inside I feel I have something to tell. I know that my life has been different, will always be different, that I am different. With every memoir I read there is a swelling in my chest, a whisper I hear saying, "Tell your story. You have it in there, right under the surface, you just need to know how." This is, primarily, why I've chosen "how to write a memoir" as the basis of my I-search.

Yet, that truly is not all. I can't stop there, all neat and crisp. Expected. If I want to write a memoir, if I want to write more than one, I've got to be honest. A memoir must not be a fraud, must not be cheapened by leaving out the parts that make the writer feel shy and awkward.

I want to learn how to effectively write a memoir, a piece that is fluid and elegant and exposing, because I've seen a few things in life that I've never gotten by. We all have our complexities and our hang-ups. I realized one day that I don't think I'll ever move on from the things that appear in my mind at night if I never get it on paper. "Let the trash go," my husband says. "Turn it into art, if you want, but you've got to let it go." He's right. This memoir mission is personal. To see life written down in black ink on a white page, for me, makes it more manageable. Gives it some sense.

If I learn how to write my story thus far, I believe I'll be able to move on to the next story I've yet to create.