What is Your Memoir–in 6 Words?

Can you write your life story in six words? Legend has it that someone asked Ernest Hemingway to write a story in six words or less. His response?

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

This legend lead to the creation of a New York Times bestseller book, Not Quite What I was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Famous Writers and Obscure (Harper Perennial 2008). Some examples from the book include: “Extremely responsible, secretly longed for spontaneity,” by Sabra Jennings, and “No future, no past. Not lost,” by Matt Brensilver. I first read about this challenge in a blog by Michael Sean Symonds in Ode Magazine.

His six-word memoir: “Struggled, survived, surrendered; dreamed, played, gave, thrived.”

While I was reading this, I was also eating chocolate. So naturally the first six-word memoir that popped in my mind was, “Can’t stop eating chocolate. Oh well.”

While I’m not sure I would want that to be the ultimate memoir of my life (especially after reading some of the sophisticated and profound examples)—there is no denying that it is telling of my personality. But I will continue to write multiple 6-word memoirs, because—well they’re fun and good journal entries.

posted by Megan Zehnder Sep 23, 2009 7:13 am Care2