Memoir, a letter to...

By Julia a Bookloft bookseller

According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary memoir is "a narrative composed from personal experience or an account of something noteworthy".  Memoir comes in a variety of ways. There is the memoir as story or essay as in "The Book of Delights" by Ross Gay, memoir as fiction as in "Motherhood" by Sheila Heti, fiction as memoir where the story reaches so deep into you that it can only be true as is the case with Ocean Vuong's "On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous". Perhaps the only way to tell your story is to tell it as fiction as in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried".

Many are memoirs as letters. Who are these letters written to? There is letter to a child, a parent, a partner, to a close friend, for someone we've lost, a letter for healing, to the world, to the reader, the one they wished they had received, the letter to a former version of the author's self, or a version they have yet to become....

Here is a list of many of these different letters to read and take in. Experience, to witness, and appreciate.