Blog 7

My memoir is about how I felt when my grandmother died and how I take adantage of telling the grandparents that I still have how much they mean to me. My foocus is how important it is to tell the ones you love how much they mean to you on a daily basis and to treat everyday like Valentines day. While writing this story I certain of everything I wrote because it is the most vivid memory I have as a child. There is no alteration in anything from the smell of the house to making cookies, everything is exactly how I recalled and to make sure I called my mother who reconfirmed that day for me. The dialouge that I have in the beginning with my grandmother is the same conversation I have with her almost every week. There are no relevant details that I left out and the details that I added in the beginning of the story were meant to make the day seem beautiful so the readers can envision a Valentines Day morning. The tone I choose in the beginning is happy and peaceful and as I was writing the 2nd part I felt sad and also felt that it was insightful towards the end because I did learn something from that experience. My grandmother is my main focus and she was such an incredible woman, I probably didnt even idealize her enough. My motive was to get across how great she was and how special she was in my life.

Blog 6.5

Schwartz’s essay is about how to write a memoir that is based on truth events and drawing the line between a memoir and a fictional story. A good example of this is James Frey’s book. Even though Frey touches up events that he did experience, he exaggerates them which make them false. His story could have been a non fiction memoir but it is sadly a fictional story, one that I personally feel no one should spend time reading. I could understand if an author can not remember specific colors to things or outfits and if these changed aspects are not important to the story then I feel it is ok to stretch a little. Also, what I believe is ok to modify is the characters name so their identity is protected but anything else is unacceptable. It is not ok, however, to add characters and people that never existed, as Frey did in his book. All in all, I feel like what Frey did was wrong and I think he added all of those false experiences because he felt his life was too boring to be a good read.