Week 6: Analyzing Memoirs

     Lena Dunham’s story in the New Yorker was engaging and very well written, but I don’t know that I really saw myself in her story. I wasn’t sure what the point was - or maybe I assumed the message was going to be one thing and it turned out to be about her relationship with her mother and other women in her life like her therapists and friends. I think the blog post about “Cousins” was a much more relatable experience to me. I’ve definitely had those moments with a friend, family member, someone I was in a relationship with (or wanted to be) and I missed an opportunity to say something. Whether it was pride, fear, anger, jealousy, etc. that prevented me from saying something that eventually created a distance between me and someone else…and created a lost opportunity. I think the moment that the author also talks about the awkwardness when they met up a year or so later and then they sort of “apologized” without having to say anything is also something I have experienced in my life.

     I felt like the blog post was much more direct and succinct; however, it felt like there was more telling than showing. For example when the author writes about her cousin leaving she writes, “Not only that, but she was always fun to be around. Most of the memories from those two years are filled with laughter.” I think this would have been an opportunity to share a short anecdote about something that happened which they had both ended up laughing uproariously about. Show a moment when there was laughter not just tell the reader that the years were filled with laughter. Ms. Dunham’s story definitely showed much more than it “told” her story, but I felt like it was a little lengthy and wandered to different time periods, relationships, and people that at some points felt a little disjointed which required me to go back and reread to clarify what I was reading. I felt like a good example of when she was descriptively showing and not telling was when she wrote, “we sit at her desk and focus on organizing my backpack, which somehow resembles, in all its dark chaos, a crack den (albeit one full of Hello Kitty erasers).” But when she writes, “That Audrey and I wind up at college together is one of the strangest things that has happened, maybe ever, but definitely to me;” in reference to her ending up at college with therapist’s daughter it seemed totally out of left field and didn’t flow with the piece. Overall I felt like the blog post could have sprinkled in more details to show the closeness between the author and the cousin who left, and Ms. Dunham’s piece could have been a little bit more focused or streamlined so as not to feel like it wandered in odd directions at times.

     Both of these stories seemed to be grounded in truth. However, I would say that the “Cousin” blog post could have used a few more details to add to the believability of the story the author was sharing. Lena’s story definitely felt like there were more fiction writing elements that took a true story and the writer in her crated more of a work of fiction than memoir. I guess I’m a little torn as to whether I think these stories are embellished or grounded in complete fact. But I guess that is a testament to good writing…if you can’t say for certain whether they are true stories or made up.