On this page, we are going to explore one of the two options for genre that you have for your Literacy Narrative Revision in a bit more depth: the memoir-style essay.
See last class for more information on the personal letter. That option is a bit more straightforward.
The memoir essay is a little more in depth. Memoirs, especially in essay format, tend to try to do these three things:
- Entertain
- Get audience to think differently about something
- Relate and build solidarity with others about a topic
Click on the below and choose 3 memoir essays to skim through. See what they have in common.
Name 2-3 genre expectations that you notice in a comment below (e.g., how it starts, how it is formatted, paragraphing, kinds of words used, its organization, what happens toward the end). That is, what do the 3 memoirs sort of have in common in the words, sentences, organization, design, etc. that make up each essay? Be specific.
18 Essay-Length Short Memoirs to Read Online on Your Lunch Break
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The Memoir essays that I chose were Scaachi Koul, Kaveh Akbar and Ashley C. Ford, in all these memoir essays, there is the common way that a story is told. The perspective that we are given allows us as the reader to understand and to analyze what we are being told. Each of the essays were able to provide insight of the lives of the author and with great detail these memoirs allowed me as the reader to feel that I personally knew what the author went through in the essay.
I read “Me Talk Pretty One Day” and “My Family’s Slave.” From what I’ve read, I gathered that memoirs tend to start in the middle of an event, in order to immediately hook the audience. Also, memoirs consist of many interrelated events told through short paragraphs (about 100-200 words each). Each event is approximately 5-10 paragraphs.
After reading 3 of the memoir essays assigned (I read the ones written by Kaveh Akbar, Ashley C. Ford, and Scaachi Koul), I was able to depict how the three are very similar. They all have similar structure (i.e. we are briefly given an introduction, all three essays gave detailed background information about the author and his/ her life, and gave ideas for the audience to ponder on. I was expecting to see these examples in each memoir after the first/ second as they are all similar.
The memoirs that I chose for analysis are: “There’s No Recipe for Growing Up” by Scaachi Koul, “The Year I Grew Wildly While Men Looked On” by Ashley C. Ford, and “How I Found Poetry in Childhood Prayer” by Kaveh Akbar. In all three memoirs, the authors use descriptive language in a way that makes one develop a mental picture of what they are talking about. The authors also explain their experiences during childhood as well as how they contributed to making them who they are as adults. I found the short memoirs to be captivating and insightful because of how the authors describe the sequence of events leading up to the time that they were written.
I chose the memoirs “There’s No Recipe for Growing Up” , “The Year I Grew Wildly While Men Looked On”, and “My Dad Tried to Kill Me With an Alligator.” In all these memoirs I saw how they were stores the authors told about themselves constantly using the word “I.” All these memoirs spoke about life changing stories that you can tell mean a lot to the author. It is almost like all the stores help us see how the authors became who they are today. Another think I realized with these members is that they all had dialogue that helped them tell their story.
I read the memoirs by the authors Ford, Koul, and Key. In all three memoirs there was a story or multiple stories being told and within those was some sort of dialogue. They all started off very to the point and jumping straight into what happened. One final thing I noticed in all three was the formatting. They all starting a new paragraph or section when going from one idea to another.
I chose “My Dad Tried to Kill Me With An Alligator”, “Me Talk Pretty One Day”, and “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”. Memoirs immediately establish a time setting, either a specific year or using ages as a frame of reference. The three memoirs next developed the specific location and in the case of the latter two, the reason for being there. Regarding structure, the paragraphs are often broken up by dialogue or single sentences that need extra emphasis. In “I’m a Stranger Here Myself”, it is also broken up to illustrate an example of wordplay with “John under hill and over Mass”.
the texts I choose are: “The Year I Grew Wildly, While Men Looked On”, There’s No Recipe For Growing Up” and “Me Talk Pretty One Day”
Most of this stories engage the audience by giving them a first person perspective of the story. The author guides the reader’s emotions by expressing their own in the story. Some narration also start in a way that makes the reader crave for more information, which engages them in the story.
I read Scaachi Kool and Ashley C. Ford’s piece. Both are similar in the structure and the information that is being conveyed. They both wrote about the personal experiences they went through growing up. They both provided good information to back up their claims and draw the reader’s attention. I relate to both writers because I see myself constantly relating back to personal experiences I went through and how they shaped me into the person I am today.
I chose to read “There’s no Recipe for Growing Up,” and “My Dad Tried to Kill me With an Alligator.” Both of these stories seems to start right off by getting right in the middle of the story. They also seem to focus a lot on their feelings and internal reactions to the experiences going on around them. The point seems to be about the bigger impact of a small experience in a person’s life.
The memoirs I chose were “The Year I Grew Wildly While Men Looked on”, “My Family’s Slave” and “The Things They Carried”. I think the similarity between them would be how painstakingly harsh they all are. I’ve actually previously read most of “The Things They Carried” (though it was back in 8th grade and I didn’t quite understand all of it) and I can see that the way the story ends, along with how the other memoirs end, was painfully raw. “The Things They Carried” essentially talks about the burdens that soldiers carry as they deal with the moral ambiguity of their crimes, “The Year i Grew Wildly While Men Looked on” talked about the author facing hypersexualization as a young black girl but abruptly ends after recalling a specific moment, and “My Family’s Slave” ends with the author returning the ashes of the woman who spent basically all of her life enslaved by his family. I think the endings in particular somehow allude to how harsh reality really is for us as living conscious beings, and how not every narrative can be created or told with a smile on your face.
– Kaveh Akbar: How I Found Poetry in Childhood Prayer
– I Had a Stroke at 33
– My Family’s Slave
Something in common with the essays is that the authors go through or discover a incident in their life that helped them define their identity. They focus on experience and take their reader through that experience and end with the ultimate lesson that they derived from the experiences.