WEEK 5: Memoir Review

Fluidity while writing a memoir is important to focus on because this is YOUR memory or experience you are recounting on, not your readers.  What seems like common sense or obvious to you may not come across that way to your audience and fluidity will help you avoid that confusion. Fluidity is important because readers will not want to continue reading something that sounds choppy, but they will read something that sounds nice when strung together.  Having a variety of sentences with different sounding beginnings and different length and structure will make your writing sound fluid when read.  

https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/a1419/talk-pretty-0399/

This memoir titled "Me Talk Pretty One Day" is hilarious!  The author discusses his experience in his study abroad french class in which his professor would insult and physically wound her students.  They left the first class thinking that it could only go up from there but that could not have been further from the truth.  I really related to the author when he described his feelings about nervousness and insecurities.  He says "At my age, a reasonable person should have completed his sentence in the prison of the nervous and the insecure--isn't that the great promise of adulthood?"  This is relatable, and therefore quite funny, to me because I sometimes find it hard to order coffee at a coffee shop.  He tells us at the end of his memoir that he finally realized what the point was of that entire year of basically abuse.  The author says that his professor told him "Everyday I spend with you is like having a cesarean section." and suddenly he realized he now knew every word that someone was saying.  He was able to leave that class knowing every insult in the french language.

If I had found out the the writer blurred the lines between what was fact and fiction about his story I would definitely begin to question the teachers intentions.  If he fudged even a little bit of the truth I think I would believe the teacher really was borderline abusive and really really hated her job.  

This memoir is fluid because he strings in sentences that are humorous really well with sentences that are rather serious.  He mixes long sentences with short sentences and the sentences vary in the way that they begin which allows the memoir to read very smoothly.

This memoir could transfer to a blog and is definitely something I would find myself reading online.  I never knew until trying to make the comparison between this memoir and a blog post how similar they are to each other.