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That’s the story of my life

Is it early 2006 already? Slate is tapping into the hot (OK, cooling) topic of memoirs with “Memoir Week,” a series of articles on the form, as well as first-person essays by authors. Among the latter is a piece by Mary Karr, who warned her friends about her plans to write The Liars’ Club, and recounts their reactions and requests. “The large complaint involved my friend Meredith,” Karr writes. “She asked that I take out the scene of her cutting herself with a razor. She didn’t mind if I reinserted it in later editions, after her elderly mother died.” Sean Wilsey‘s own family memoir, Oh the Glory of It All, inspired two very different reactions:

[Wilsey's mother] said, “Sean, it’s such an accurate portrait of so many people that I know that I’ve had to conclude it must be an accurate portrait of me, too. And so I’m really going to have to take a look at the fact that I come across that way.” It was a very big thing to say. Then she paused and said, “Or at least that I come across that way to you.” Now, next month in fact, she’s publishing a memoir of her own, called, at the insistence of her publisher, Oh the Hell of It All.

My stepmother, Dede, whom I did not consult, was so enraged by what I wrote about her that she hired a lawyer and threatened to sue me. Then, she hired a publicist. She’s been making regular appearances in glossy magazines ever since.

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