Writing About Your Life

This 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. Zinsser’s method is to take you on a memoir o...

This 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. Zinsser’s 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. 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.