Danielle Trussoni Quotes

I never thought I would write an autobiography, probably because my first novel, Go Now, is really all drawn from my life, even though it's more about the psychology going on.

A lot of folks just get it in their head that, for instance, like writing memoirs is just easy. You just write down what happened. It doesn't quite work that way.

I don't know where to start," one [writing student] will wail. Start with your childhood, I tell them. Plug your nose and jump in, and write down all your memories as truthfully as you can. Flannery O' Connor said that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life. Maybe your childhood was grim and horrible, but grim and horrible is Okay if it is well done. Don't worry about doing it well yet, though. Just get it down.

You'd only write what you know and what you know is what you do and the people you know. So you'd write about them or the people you have met casually. It's part of your life.

My books are written from personal experience, from memories, and from stories that come to me from all places.

A lot of people think the best work I've done was nonfiction - the 'Brothers and Keepers' book. But I think of myself as a fiction writer. And I think, if my work is put in perspective, all the books would be a continual questioning of what's true and what's not true, what's documented and what's not documented.

There are autobiographical elements to the albums, and when I write, I always reference my own life as well as other things, so I'm just like any novelist or any fiction writer who tells stories.

I began as a fiction writer - I had written three novels in my 20s and 30s. But as my work has gravitated towards literary nonfiction, or lyric essay or poetic essay, whatever you want to call it, I'm constantly beating my head against the wall 'cause I'm teaching a genre that's no longer that exciting to me and that I'm no longer practicing.

In the early Seventies, I started writing a little autobiographical novel about my childhood - I made it into a mystery story.

In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.

I suppose I reached the limit of what I could do with nonfiction books, perhaps because they never felt quite intense enough - it's a journalistic enterprise, ultimately, even if you are using the memoir as a form.

We write about things that we've done or things that have happened to people around us.

Autobiography. Apparently one should not name the names of those one has been to bed with, or give explicit figures on the amount of money one has earned, those being the two data most eagerly sought by readers; all the rest is legitimate to reveal.

A memoir provides a record not so much of the memoirist as of the memoirist's world.

Anything that happens to you has some bearing upon what you write.

In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.

I actually find it pretty tedious when magazines ask me to write articles based on my real life, because I've already lived it and there's nothing new to discover. So, I'm unlikely to write a memoir.

When I wrote nonfiction, my best work was the really personal stuff.

Yes, one uses what one knows, but autobiography means something else. I should never be able to write a real autobiography; I always end by falsifying and fictionalizing—I’m a liar, in fact. That means I’m a novelist, after all. I write about what I know.

I'm writing my biography. It's my business. This is what happened in my life, and I'm writing about it.

All writers write about themselves, just as the old storytellers chose to tell stories that spoke to and about themselves. They call it the world, but it is themselves they portray. The world of which they write is like a mirror that reflects the inside of their hearts, often more truly than they know.

In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about.

If you're writing a book where you want to make a positive truth claim, then you should absolutely call it nonfiction or memoir. If you don't want to make that claim - if that's not what's important to you; if you're more interested in storytelling and interiority and interpersonal relationships than in objective, checkable facts about the world - then why wouldn't you call it a novel, and take advantage of what that gets you, of the extra freedom, of belonging to the tradition of the novel?

You write fiction, you're writing memoir, and when you're writing memoir, you're writing fiction.

I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?