"There was a time," Kennedy Fraser wrote, "when my life seemed so painful to me that reading about the lives of other women writers was one of the few things that could help..…I felt I should pretend that I was reading only these women's fiction or poetry – their lives as they chose to present them, alchemized as art. But that would be a lie. It was the private messages I really liked -- the journals and letters and autobiographies and biographies whenever they seemed to be telling the truth."

I really like those private messages too. I read memoir because I'm interested in knowing how other people have actually experienced life. I'm also interested in contextualizing my own experience, normalizing it sometimes, or measuring how different it has been from the norm. I read memoir for information, as well as for inspiration, solace and amusement. I read memoir because I'm a perennial student and my favorite way of learning things is through one-to-one instruction. Even more than information, I'm in search of language, language in which to express women's experience that I have sometimes lacked the ability to translate into words myself. This lecture explores a journalist's approach to the form.