Someone wrote to say, “A couple years ago you talked about the important of reading great books, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen you offer a reading list to authors. What books would you recommend?”

Hmmm…. Okay, I think I did this once before, but here you go. I did some work on this, and I now present The MacGregor Recommended Reading List for Writers…

Ancients (old books writers ought to at least have read once): Homer’s ILIAD and ODYSSEY; Sophocles’ OEDIPUS REX; Euripides’ THE TROJAN WOMEN and ELECTRA; Herodotus’ THE HISTORIES; Thucydides’ HISTORY OF THE PELOPPENESIAN WAR; Sun Tsu’s THE ART OF WAR; Aristophanes’ LYSISTRATA; Plato’s SELECTED WORKS; Virgil’s THE AENEID

Classics (the classic books that every writer should probably be familiar with): Augustine’s CONFESSIONS; Dante’s DIVINE COMEDY; Chaucer’s CANTERBURY TALES; Shahrazad’s THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS; Machiavelli’s THE PRINCE; Miguel de Servants’ DON QUIXOTE; Shakespeare’s COMPLETE WORKS; John Donne’s SELECTED WORKS; Galileo’s DIALOGUE CONCERNING THE TWO CHIEF WORLD SYSTEMS; Hobbe’s LEVIATHAN; Descarte’s DISCOURSE ON METHOD; Milton’s PARADISE LOST; Moliere’s PLAYS; Blaise Pascal’s PENSEES; Bunyan’s PILGRIM’S PROGRESS; John Locke’s SECOND TREATISE ON GOVERNMENT; Daniel Defoe’s ROBINSON CRUSOE; Jonathan Swift’s GULLIVER’S TRAVELS; Voltaire’s CANDIDE; Henry Fielding’s TOM JONES; Laurence Sterne’s TRISTRAM SHANDY; James Boswell’s LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON; Thomas Jefferson’s BASIC DOCUMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY; Hamilton, Madison, and Jay’s THE FEDERALIST PAPERS.

Moderns (a change here — we get into the modern version of the novel): Jane Austen’s PRIDE AND PREJUDICE; Stendahl’s THE RED AND THE BLACK; Hawthorne’s THE SCARLET LETTER; Thackeray’s VANITY FAIR; Dicken’s THE PICKWICK PAPERS, DAVID COPPERFIELD, HARD TIMES, THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP; Charlotte Bronte’s JANE EYRE; Emily Bronte’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS; Anthony Trollope’s THE WAY WE LIVE NOW and THE WARDEN; Herman Melville’s MODY DICK; George Elliott’s THE MILL ON THE FLOSS; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s FAUST; Gustave Flaubert’s MADAME BOVARY; Selected poems of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman;  Alexis de Tocqueville’s DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA; the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe; Thoreau’s WALDEN.

Moving Toward Contemporaries (these aren’t really “contemporary” yet, but they’re in the time of transition as literature moved toward contemporary books — and yes, feel free to argue with me on definitions, since I’m making this up as I go along): Dostoyevsky’s CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV; Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE; Mark Twain’s HUCKLEBERRY FINN; Lewis Carroll’s ALICE’S ADVENTURE IN WONDERLAND; Henry Adams’ THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS; Thomas Hardy’s THE MAYOR OF CASTORBRIDGE; Henry James’ THE AMBASSADORS; Joseph Conrad’s NOSTROMO; Anton Chekhov’s THREE SISTERS and THE CHERRY ORCHARD; George Bernard Shaw’s MAJOR BARBARA; Edith Wharton’s THAT HOUSE OF MIRTH; Marcel Proust’s SWANN’S WAY; Thomas Mann’s THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN; the poetry of Yates.

Contemporary (here’s where there will be the most argument — lots of folks could be added or subtracted): The poetry of Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden; E.M. Forster’s A PASSAGE TO INDIA; James Joyce’s ULYSSES; Virginia Woolf’s TO THE LIGHTHOUSE;  D.H. Lawrence’s SONS AND LOVERS; Eugene O’Neill’s LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT and THE ICEMAN COMETH; Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD; William Faulkner’s AS I LAY DYING; Ernest Hemingway’s THE SUN ALSO RISES; George Orwell’s 1984; Albert Camus’ THE PLAGUE; Saul Bellow’s THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARSH; Aleksander Solzhenitsy’s CANCER WARD; Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 YEARS OF SOLITUDE; Thomas Pynchon’s GRAVITY’S RAINBOW; Samuel Becket’s WAITING FOR GODOT.

What’s Missing? Novels from our own day. Genre novels. Christian novels (which we represent a bunch of). Lots of others. What do you think? What’s missing? What would you add? 

Someone wrote to ask, “So what do we need to keep in mind when creating memoir?”

Fist, keep in mind there’s a difference between “memoir” and “autobiography.” An autobiography is a straight retelling of one’s life — what happened, what were the events/decisions, what did those result in. A memoir is a more personal narrative of the significant change points in one’s life. It doesn’t have to be linear, whereas an autobiography is almost always linear. And the focus of a memoir can be more on the effects in your personal life — what you were feeling, what you learned, how you changed. The end result is almost always on a catharsis of some kind. So while the goal of autobiography is to get the facts straight, the goal of memoir is something more akin to “revealing myself and my story, in order to reveal principles that will help others live more effectively.” (This isn’t a dictionary definition, it’s a MacGregor Definition.)

Second, people understand the world best through story, so that’s how you have to think. What are the stories that reveal your life and your character? What stories happened to you that changed you?  You see, if you’re not a celebrity, nobody really cares about your everyday life (and, to tell you the truth, I’ve never cared to read celebrity biographies very much because…well, I don’t care about THEIR everyday life either). If someone wanted to understand my life, to see who I am and why, they wouldn’t care about a cold retelling of the facts. They’d rather hear some of my story — my dad’s conversation with me one morning just before he committed suicide, the person who told me I could write, my success as a writer, my failure as a publisher, my mom’s ugly death, the miracle that occurred in my car, the fact that people have stayed with me when I was a jerk, etc. I think if an author can get the stories down, tell them honestly and with a strong voice, they’re well on the way to creating memoir.

Third, most memoirs are about moving forward and finding answers, not about moving toward destruction. Every fiction writer knows an audience likes a redemption story best. So don’t just tell me about all your mistakes — show me. Don’t assume I’m interested in something just because you are. Make me like you before you dump dirt. If I’m not feeling sympathy for you, I’m going to stop reading. And don’t share a bunch of bad stuff about your family, thinking your catharsis is necessarily fascinating reading to others. Again, story will trump a recitation of events. (In I WENT TO THE ANIMAL FAIR, Heather Harpham reveals the presence of some mental illness in her family by telling the story of visiting her grandmother’s house one day and finding toast nailed to the wall. Her entire family was there, but nobody talked about it. They all pretended they didn’t see it, or maybe that toast on the wall was a routine occurrence. It’s a fascinating detail.)

I often get people sending me their personal story — “THIS happened to me, and everybody tells me I should write a book about it!” My response is usually a yawn. Yes, I’m a spiritual person who believes God is alive and doing great things. Yes, miracles still happen. And yes, lives get changed in incredible ways, sometimes through supernatural power and sometimes through dumb luck, and the re-telling of that can be valuable (after all, people have been telling dramatic stories since cave men sat around the fire telling whoppers about the great mastodon hunt). But the fact that something amazing happened to you doesn’t have much to do with the creation of a great memoir. The whole “personal story” book era has come and gone (circa 1977). Like I said yesterday, nobody is buying your personal story.

So fourth, the quality of the craft is essential. If you can write exceptionally well, and reveal yourself on the page, and get beyond the retelling of WHAT happened in order to get us to think about the greater issues of HOW that changed you and WHY that’s important and WHAT the principles for living more effectively are, THEN you’ve got the potential to write a memoir.  As a reader I’ve got to relate to your character, trust that you’re being honest, be interested/entertained by your story, and expect you to relate to timeless questions about life faced in complex circumstances. I want to read about the decisions you made, knowing those decisions might not have been right, and then read about the results. If all those things come into play, you’ve got potential with your memoir. It’s not a recounting of an entire life; it’s the well-written, thoughtful story of an author in a season of time.

So I suppose it’s fair to ask what some good examples are. I can think of several…

- Anne Lamott’s TRAVELING MERCIES. Her spiritual pilgrimage is interesting and inspirational, and her writing is fabulous.

- Jeanette Walls’ THE GLASS CASTLE has fabulous writing and tells a story you’ll long remember.

- Haven Kimmel’s A GIRL NAMED ZIPPY is a hilarious look at growing up in a small town.

-Lauren Winner’s GIRL MEETS GOD is a dynamite book, and one of those projects that I continually wonder why it isn’t talked about more often.

-Jenny Lawson’s LET’S PRETEND THIS NEVER HAPPENED is a riot, and (mostly) true.

-Madeleine L’Engle’s TWO PART INVENTION is the story of her marriage, and A CIRCLE OF QUIET is a contemplative book with a grand theme.

There are others. A friend of mine, Lisa McKay is just releasing LOVE AT THE SPEED OF EMAIL, which I think is charming. (Got my hard copy today!) What memoir writing do you appreciate?