Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past

248 Pages·2005·10.148 MB·English

by  William Zinsser

BELVEDERE TIBURON LIBRARY
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Writing
About
Your Life
A Journey into the Past
William Zinsser
On Writing Well
AUTHOR OF
U.S. $23.95
T
his highly original book by William
Zinsser, author of the classic guide On Writing
Well\ tells you how to write about the people
and places and events in your life that have been
important to you—whether you’re writing a memoir,
a family history or just a recollection of experiences
you’d like to preserve or more fully understand. His
method is to take you on a memoir of his own: 13
chapters in which he recalls dramatic, amusing and
often inspiring moments in his long and unusually
varied life as a writer, editor, teacher and traveler.
It’s a journey full of surprising turns. William Zinsser
recalls his school days and influential teachers, his
army days in North Africa and Italy, his newspaper
days with the legendary New York Herald Tribune, his
teaching days at Yale, his role in a Woody Allen
movie, his years as a baseball addict and his late-in-life
career playing jazz piano. He also recalls a lifetime of
exotic travels through Africa, Asia and the South
Seas, evoking a gallery of memorable people—
a dance teacher in Bali, a French explorer in Tahiti,
a Vietnamese poet in Hanoi—whose stories moved
him with their power.
Along the way in these memoirs William Zinsser
pauses to explain the technical decisions he made as
he wrote them. They are the same decisions you’ll
have to make as you write about your own life:
matters of selection, condensation, focus, attitude,
voice and tone.
Written with elegance, warmth and humor, Writing
About Your Life gives you the tools to organize and
recover your past and the confidence to believe in
your life narrative. It also gives you permission—
through the example of a life enriched by change and
risk—to make bold life choices of your own.

Writing About Your Life

BOOKS IN PRINT
BY WILLIAM ZINSSER
On Writing Well
HarperCollins
Writing to Learn
HarperCollins
Mitchell Ruff
Paul Dry Books
(formerly Willie and Dwike)
Spring Training
University of Pittsburgh Press
American Places
The Akadine Press
Easy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters
and Their Songs
David R. Godine, Publisher
Writing About Your Life
Marlowe & Company
EDITED BY WILLIAM ZINSSER
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir
Houghton Mifflin
Worlds of Childhood:
The Art and Craft of Writing for Children
Houghton Mifflin
Going on Faith: Writing as a Spiritual Quest
Marlowe & Company
AUDIO BOOKS
BY WILLIAM ZINSSER
On Writing Well
HarperCollins
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/writingaboutyourOOzins_O
Writing
About
Your Life
A Journey into the Past
William Zinsser
Marlowe & Company
New York
Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past
Copyright © 2004 by William K. Zinsser
Published by
Marlowe & Company
An Imprint of Avalon PubHshing Group Incorporated
245 West 17th Street • nth Floor
New York, NY 10011-5300
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without
written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts
in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor
may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in
any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other,
without written permission from the publisher.
Portions of this book first appeared in the New York Times, Travel Holiday, the American
Scholar, the Sewanee Review, Lingua Franca, the Atlantic Monthly and in the books
Spring Training and Going on Faith.
The passage by Russell Baker in chapter 10 and the passage by Ian Frazier in chapter 12
are from Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser
(Houghton Mifflin, 1987,1995,1998). Copyright © 1987 by
Russell Baker. Reprinted by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc.
Copyright © 1998 by Ian Frazier. Reprinted by permission of the author.
The passage by Pablo Neruda in chapter 12 is an excerpt from The Gift by Lewis Hyde.
Copyright © 1979, 1980, 1983 by W. Lewis Hyde. Used by permission of
Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 1-56924-468-5
987654321
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Printed in the United States of America
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