I need your thoughts S.V.P.!

[soleta_nf]

In the spirit of gearing up for NaNo and thinking about what and how I want to write, I'd like you all to recommend your favourite autobiographies/personal memoirs. Then tackle any or all or these questions:

• In what way has this memoir touched you?
• Was it the writing or the subject that moved you, or both?
• What creative approach did the author invoke to tell his or her own story in an effective way? What did you like about this approach, and what do you think didn't work as well?
• What kind of autobiographies/personal memoirs would you be interested in reading? (i.e. on certain subjects, with certain creative approaches, written in a certain way.)

The author of the book I recommended in my last post, Writing from the Body, often speaks autobiographically to get his point across. He talked a lot about his first book, The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man, which was about his painful relationship with his father; or, from the book jacket: "The book is about grieving, a very misunderstood process often confused with self-pity." I haven't read it yet, but that sounds definitely the kind of personal memoir I would enjoy reading.

My all-time favourite autobiography would have to be Shirlee Taylor Haizlip's The Sweeter the Juice: A Family Memoir in Black and White. It's part family and personal memoir, part genealogy, and part history. It's a fascinating account of how at the turn of the (19th) century half of her family decided to cross the colour line and become "white". After living with her mother's grief at losing half of her family, Haizlip as an adult decided to find these family members, and the book details her journey along the way. The underlying point that I took away from the novel is that none of us can really claim to be "white" or "black", as in the United States (and Canada and many other places) family genealogies are never that "pure" -- we are all a melange, a mix, and in discriminating and being hateful of others, we are really discriminating and being hateful of ourselves.

I really enjoyed the author's vivid mixture of historical and personal accounts, and the creative approach in trying to tell a story at the impressively macro and revealingly micro levels. This is the way to tell historically important stories in such a way that we engage people, and not bore them with a succession of "facts" that most people now identify as dry, boring history.

So what are your favourites?