The DOI matches its Crossref record.
Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir
Abstract
An indispensable book by writers who have experienced firsthand the rewards and challenges of crafting a memoir Anyone undertaking the project of writing a memoir knows that the events, memories, and emotions of the past often resist the orderly structure of a book. Inventing the Truth offers wisdom from nine notable memoirists about their process (Ian Frazier searched through generations of family papers to understand his parents' lives), the hurdles they faced (Annie Dillard tackles the central dilemma of memoir: what to put in and what to leave out), and the unexpected joys of bringing their pasts to the page. Featured authors include Russell Baker on Growing Up; Jill Ker Conway on The Road from Coorain; Annie Dillard on An American Childhood; Ian Frazier on Family; Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Colored People; Alfred Kazin on A Walker in the City; Frank McCourt on Angela's Ashes; Toni Morrison on Beloved; and Eileen Simpson on Poets in Their Youth.
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Citations
Cited by
Lyons, K. (2023) · Environmental Humanities · doi:10.1215/22011919-10216206 · Cited by 8
Metadata
- Authors
- Baker, W., & Zinsser, W.
- Venue
- The Antioch Review
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 1988
- Volume
- 46
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 117
- ISSN
- 0003-5769 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1969170851
- Cited by
- 446
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 27.85
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/4611853
- The paper
- Baker, W., & Zinsser, W. (1988). Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. The Antioch Review. https://doi.org/10.2307/4611853
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
