Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir Offers Beginning and Experienced Writers Alike An Indispensable Road Map for Writing Life Stories
Award-winning writer and VCFA MFA in Writing faculty member Sue William Silverman, whose previous memoir
, Love Sick: One Woman's Journey through Sexual Addiction, became a Lifetime Television movie, has just published her much anticipated guide to the often daunting and complex task of memoir
writing. Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir is a step-by-step guide to shaping memory into art, to turning imagery into metaphor – all the elements needed to craft raw experience into a fully formed story.
Silverman, whose own journey through sexual abuse and addiction formed the basis for two acclaimed memoirs, candidly uses her own experience as examples of how she came, through writing, to more fully understand her own life narratives.
“Everyone has memories,” says Silverman. “Everyone has a story to tell. Too often those memories, those stories, remain silent, for lack of the right words to bring them to light. That’s why I wrote Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, to help writers transform the fragments of memory into compelling stories. Writing can be lonely. Having a guide to lead you through the maze of memory and show you the power in being unafraid of revealing your secrets, can help you discover your true story.”
She continues, “Combined with chapters on how to find the plot of your life, how to write with style and then market the final product, Fearless Confessions can help take your real life experiences from the scrapbook to the bookshelf.”
Silverman is credited by many as a writer who has elevated the literary merit of autobiographical, “confessional” writing, not only redeeming the value of confession artistically but also by her singularly pragmatic approach to giving voice to what was previously unclear and unattainable through memory alone.