Jen Lancaster Quotes

The reason I like writing a memoir is because it isn't preachy.

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

The difference between memoir and autobiography, as far as I see it, is that a memoir is there primarily to tell one particular story, whereas an autobiography tries to be a full account of a life.

When you are writing a memoir, you have the advantage of knowing how it all ends. It's just taking your life apart and putting it together again.

Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.

It took me 14 years to write 'Crazy Brave' because I kept changing the form and I also kept running away from the story. I said I don't really want to write about myself. But it's about writing about memory.

All autobiography is storytelling; all writing is autobiography.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

Some people think memoirs should be held to a perfect journalistic standard. Some people don't. Obviously I don't. My goal was never to create or to write a perfect journalistic standard of my life. It was always to be as literature.

I write about my life, choosing incidents that I think will be, for one reason or another, significant to people. Often because they may have experienced the same things.

I used to think, 'How can I write my life story? I'm still living it.'

I think many people need, even require, a narrative version of their life. I seem to be one of them. Writing memoir is, in some ways, a work of wholeness.

I have an obsession with details and pattern.

I've always been very attentive to detail. It's a characteristic that drives some people crazy. But on the other hand, when people around me are sloppy, that drives me crazy.

The term 'celebrity memoir' has gotten such a bad name now, but there used to be a little bit of an art form to it.

For me, the way to approach a subject such as Vietnam is through storytelling.

I've been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don't tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It's not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.

I think the most important thing journalism taught me is to mine for details. The details are key. You can't try to be funny or strange or poignant; you have to let the details be funny or strange or poignant for you.

There's no detail too small for me.

Writing a memoir is such a private, personal experience that it's intimidating to think of adapting it for television.

Because I write fiction, I don't write autobiography, and to me they are very different things. The first-person narrative is a very intimate thing, but you are not addressing other people as 'I' - you are inhabiting that 'I.'

Everything that David Chase does has a tremendous amount of specificity. He is very detail oriented.

I want an autobiography without revealing any personal information.

Writing a novel is easier than writing a memoir; you are not constrained by the truth.

I think in any writing you're paying attention to detail.