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An RSL/Booker Prize Foundation Masterclass with Penelope Lively who gave a class on writing what you remember.

Top Tips

• A memoir is concerned with memory. Think about how memory works? Is it linear, chronological? Or not? Let your memoir writing reflect the workings of memory itself.
• Does the accuracy of memory matter above all? Or is the significance that you have a form of it – whether or not it would stand up in a court of law.
• We all embellish memory, do a bit of reconstruction. The best memoir writing can read like fiction, even if it is not that. Look at the story element – foster that.
• Try polishing a memory. Place it in context; what else do you know about that time, or place, or person?

Booklist

Vladimir Nabokov	Speak, Memory
Leo Tolstoy	Childhood, Boyhood, Youth
Janice Galloway	This Is Not About Me
Alan Johnson	This Boy
Martin Amis	Experience
Hilary Mantel	Giving Up The Ghost

Recorded on: June 21, 2014
Recorded at: Somerset House
Sponsored by: Booker Prize Foundation