Writing about Your Life: A Journey Into the Past

This highly original book by William Zinsser, author of the classic guide On Writing Well, tells you how to write about the people and places and events in your life that have been important to you—whether you’re writing a memoir, a family history or just a recollection of experiences you’d like to preserve or more fully understand. His method is to take you on a memoir of his own: 13 chapters in which he recalls dramatic, amusing and often inspiring moments in his long and unusually varied life as a writer, editor, teacher and traveler.

It’s a journey full of surprising turns. William Zinsser recalls his school days and influential teachers, his army days in North Africa and Italy, his newspaper days with the legendary the New York Herald Tribune, his teaching days at Yale, his role in a Woody Allen movie, his years as a baseball addict and his late-in-life career playing jazz piano. He also recalls a lifetime of exotic travels through Africa, Asia and the South Seas, evoking a gallery of memorable people—a dance teacher in Bali, a French explorer in Tahiti, a Vietnamese poet in Hanoi—whose stories moved him with their power.

Along the way in these memoirs William Zinsser pauses to explain the technical decisions he made as he wrote them. They are the same decisions you’ll have to make as you write about your own life: matters of selection, condensation, focus, attitude, voice and tone.

Written with elegance, warmth and humor, Writing About Your Life gives you the tools to organize and recover your past and the confidence to believe in your life narrative. It also gives you permission—through the example of a life enriched by change and risk—to make bold life choices of your own.