Sticky notes and markers up front: “Write your memoir on your nametag!” In back, Alex Cummings, twenty-six (“Arab hillbilly goes to New York”). ” You could spend a lifetime brainstorming. Wistful recollections work so does repetition: “Canoe guide, only got lost once.” “Birth, childhood, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence, adolescence. “Eat mutate aura amateur auteur true” (Jonathan Lethem’s nesting-doll-like memoir). (“After Harvard, had baby with crackhead.”) That doesn’t rule out dazzling nonsense. Then nothing happened.” Or to blurt out something angry: “Everyone who loved me is dead.” “Try to use specifics,” Smith added. There’s the temptation to be ironic: “Born in California. “Try not to think too hard.” That’s from SMITH’ s editor, Larry Smith. met Bill iron will.”) Something from Obama would be nice: “Hope is stronger than dope, kids!” A Canadian minister has done Jesus’: “God called Mother listened I responded.” Quieter lives can be condensed, too. Where’s Eli Manning, and Katie Couric? (“Little brother big game last laugh”? “Morning girl goes serious at night”?) And what of the Presidential candidates? (“From Ill. Hello, Si!” “Well, I thought it was funny.” “Couldn’t cope so I wrote songs.” (Graydon Carter, Stephen Colbert, Aimee Mann.) Mario Batali makes a memorable appearance: “Brought it to a boil, often.” So does Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia: “Yes, you can edit this biography.” Still, there are not nearly enough. And, happily, spliced in celebrity autobiographies: “Canada freezing. Memoirs from plumbers and a dominatrix (“Fix a toilet, get paid crap” “Woman Seeks Men-High Pain Threshold”). It started as a reader contest: Your life story in six words. The book’s originator: SMITH online magazine. “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Slightly sappy, but a decent sixer.) (Legend: he wrote a miniature masterpiece. The forebear, it’s assumed, is Hemingway. “Not Quite What I Was Planning.” A compilation of teeny tiny memoirs. But then-why shouldn’t it be? Life expectancies rise attention spans shrink. Exploited by texters, gossip columnists, haikuists. What defines you as a woman? Is there a six-word memoir you are holding on to as your identity?įor the rest of the devotional article, click here.Brevity: a good thing in writing. Sometimes a person can get deeply caught up in what she is instead of who she is. Sometimes life is impossibly hard, and this world is the scariest place to be when you no longer know who you are. Or the loss of a job, the loss of a friendship, a loss of respect, a loss of innocence. Perhaps divorce-a death all its own, coupled with crippling rejection. My loss was my husband, but perhaps you know a loss of a different kind. Few events foster such a fertile petri dish for insecurity more than a deep, sudden loss. So much of my identity felt suddenly and terribly missing. I felt like the entire world had tilted on its axis by about 30 degrees. In twelve terrible hours, my roles changed. Perhaps my six-word memoir for this dark season may have been: My brain was consumed with the tasks of getting out of bed and fighting depression and posttraumatic stress-with every ounce of my being. I became the single mom of two small boys who were now fatherless. I was thirty-one years old, my children were five and three, and suddenly my world was torn apart. He was only sick for twelve hours before he died. When I was a brand-new bride, perhaps my six-word memoirs may have been:Ī couple years later, when my children were born, as I stepped out of the classroom and claimed my role as mom, perhaps my six-word memoirs may have been:Įverything changed on a December morning of 2010, when my husband died. When I was a teacher, perhaps my six-word memoirs may have been: What would it be? What six words would summarize any seasons or truths about your life? I can chart the timeline of my adult life through a series of six-wore memoirs. It’s an interesting exercise to think about your life in six-word memoir. But Hemingway won the bet with this short story: “For sale, Baby shoes, Never worn.” If I were a betting girl, I would have sided with the men at the bar, believing it was impossible to have plot, character, and conflict in only six words. Folklore says that he was in a restaurant when someone challenged him to write a story in only six words. There’s a legend I love about Ernest Hemingway. Here's an excerpt of the story they shared today: I'm honored to have my words featured as a devotional with Proverbs 31 Ministries today.
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