Memoir?
Here's what I'm reading in my non-writing hours
Dearest ones,
(Fish Lady “wrote” this post in 2025, but the author was actually me, Becca Lawton, a human. F.L. is a character in my short story “Steelies,” first published by The Island Institute in Sitka, Alaska [you can still read “Steelies” in my short-story collection What I Never Told You].)1
Note that in 2026 this post serves as Step Six of Memoir Writing even if I’ve said that step is a given. Basically, Step Six advises us to read and read and let words that speak to us inform our writers’ voices. As the great Stephen King has said, “If you don’t have the time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”2
My friend Cynthia R., who is writing memoir in her Masters of Fine Arts program, asks, “What can you recommend in the area of memoir?”
Cynthia, AKA Cyn, a scientist & piscine expert, no doubt resonates with memoir connected to water and place. A tale must also have fins—you know, webs to our fellow creatures, touching the fluid truth of inner-being.
Here are a few memoir titles I believe are evergreen and fit the water bill.
A Life of One’s Own by Joanna Biggs
Why should writers starting over after great loss matter to us? Because new beginnings happen to everyone, sooner or later. And we often start over where we live. The ninth writer is the author herself, going through a wet London winter following divorce. She finds solace in the bathtub where the tears she needs to shed can finally flow. Is it any wonder that the waters help her access her deep inner being?
I say no, absolutely no wonder at all. “I wanted to create a life I would be proud of, that I could stand behind. I didn’t want to be ten years down the wrong path before I discovered once more that I was wrong.”
Check it out. Read it in the bathtub if you will.
Cross Creek by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
A woman looking for not just a room of her own, but an entire land- and waterscape, Rawlings found Cross Creek in Florida and never left. “For myself, the Creek satisfies a thing that had gone hungry and unfed since childhood days. I am often lonely. Who is not?”
Something about the creek, and the wild+human creatures drawn to it, allowed Rawlings to find her magnificent voice.
“When I came to the Creek, and I knew the old grove and farmhouse at once as home, there was some terror, such as one feels in the first recognition of human love, for the joining of person to place, as of person to person, is a commitment to shared sorrow, even as to shared joy.”
Share the joy and pick this one up.
Kat Wilder, whose own memoir, Desert Chrome: Water, A Woman, and Wild Horses in the West, is a gorgeous must-read and must-listen, sent Crazy Brave to me when I was greatly in need of solace. Harjo’s prose fits the healing bill, flowing as it does like a strong river over parched landscapes. “I’d seen the map of my life. What lay ahead in the early years was difficult. I wanted a head start to make my way through as fast as possible . . . I began choking and kicking, fighting for air. My spirit helper spoke precisely: ‘If you fight water, you drown.’”
As we who follow the rivers know, sometimes you have to swim with the deepest current. Harjo shows us how.
Read it, weep along with Harjo, and cheer when she triumphs.
Other memoir to savor:
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood (hilarious, poetic, fluid)
“The light on the water is insubstantial as it phosphenes. It recalls the pressure of fingertips on closed eyelids, and the appearance of the bright and ordered components of the universe, which turn and whirl and fit their teeth into each other.”
Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life by William Finnegan (thrilling, oceanic)
“I began to wish I had not chosen this wave, but it was too late to pull out or even, I realized, dive off—the tide seemed to have dropped two feet since my previous wave, and coral heads were suddenly boiling up everywhere. Worse, the wave seemed to be growing as it ran down the reef. It was now several feet overhead and the face was not clean. There were weird little sections and chandeliers falling and throwing.”
I Am A Stranger Here Myself by Debra Gwartney (braided like a river)
“I had water in my eyes and in my ears. It gurgled around my face. My glasses swirled away, but I didn’t notice. I kicked hard, moving against the shocking iciness of the water and the more surprising heat of my bones. I opened my eyes, and what I saw above me was blue. Not the blue of the sky, but the bottom of the raft.”
Ah, yes, the surprising heat of my bones. Genius.
Enjoy! And thanks for the question, Cyn.
Q: Why did I feel the need to let F.L. speak for me?
A: I needed a co-author in 2025. I was still going through cancer treatment.
“On Writing is both a textbook for writers and a memoir of Stephen [King]’s life and will, thus, appeal even to those who are not aspiring writers. If you’ve always wondered what led Steve to become a writer and how he came to be the success he is today, this will answer those questions” (from the publisher). Many have called King not-so-literary, but take a look at both his memoir on writing and his baseball stories and essays, e.g., “Head Down” (New Yorker, 1990). Then we’ll talk.
Thank you Becca for your generous book recommendations. Just what I needed!