Point of View

In Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, she writes: The subject of autobiography is always self-definition, but it cannot be self-definition in the void.  The memoirist, like the poet and the novelist, must engage with the world, because engagement makes experience, experience makes wisdom, and finally it’s the wisdom—or rather the movement toward it—that

If we show up in our stories as a character, our memoirs are stronger.  Why?  A reader entering a story needs shoes to walk around in and a pair of lenses to see through.  We are embodied creatures.  Even in the two-dimensional world of language, we need bodies or, at the very least, personality.  Every