Meeting today + Putting memoir-y elements in non-memoir
We're reporters - do we really need to talk about ourselves?
Hey gang,
Here’s some more input from last month’s discussion. Feel free to share!
And don’t forget, we have a meeting today - info is at the bottom (you may have to click through if the email is truncated for length - sorry!)
Some Resources I found lately:
The Expert’s Guide to Fact-Checking Your Nonfiction Book
Curious Reading Club, a Nonfiction book (reading) club
I haven’t used either of these so I can’t comment on them.
has another great post in which the author tests out AI as a research assistant and grades the various options. Very useful!One member asked:
“How much of ourselves, our lives, and our thoughts should we put in our books?”
When I was pitching agents one said it would be better if it had more of a message, moral, or thoroughline, or if it was more memoir-y. She had a point, heck, that might have been a better book if I could have hacked that, so I tried to learn memoir-y, personal essay-ish writing. I even got a scholarship to Hippocamp, a creative nonfiction conference mostly populated by people writing memoirs and personal essays. I even thought that “creative nonfiction” meant “writing about oneself, especially one’s traumas” because it was so much mostly that.
Writing about ourselves may be hard for some of us here, as someone at the last ANBIP meeting mentioned that writers, scientists and academics can be a bit modest or shy. I don’t have that problem at all! I’m happy to talk about myself all day, as I am very cool and good at things.
Still, that doesn’t mean I think a book focused on me would sell. I don’t even have a vision for what a book about me would look like or what the point of reading it would be, or who the audience is. I did not go through an emotional awakening while writing this book or while processing carcasses. I did not identify a social, personal, or political angle that is particularly close to me, although I did muse on the controversies and meanings of some practices. While I have some crazy 15-sentence stories from my life that make people at parties tell me “you should write a book about that,” these anecdotes are not really related to dead animals (and definitely not worth writing a whole book about.)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7087d4f4-a384-4f3f-8120-5edd53306bf7_5472x3648.jpeg)
So, I went with a different agent and told her not to expect anything especially personal or memoirish.
This group specifies that we’re nonfiction non-memoir authors because what we do is quite a bit different than memoir. As journalists, we try to aim for the truth, as well as we can. At Hippocamp, I recall people talking about your truth. That’s valid, just not really something journalists focus on.
But you’ll find that a lot of general audience nonfiction non-memoir books have some humanity from the author built in. Some are book-ended by personal experience. The intro is “here’s what got me interested in this topic,” the other chapters are more informational, and the afterword is “here’s what I learned/how I grew from learning this.”
I believe the books with a little personal pizzazz are better for it.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa545767f-d917-45e6-9228-546e5c803f40_5472x3648.jpeg)
I looked to see if anyone else had already written a guide to putting yourself in a non-memoir science book and didn’t find any, so instead I’ll write some mini-book reports of some books I think did a good job.
Racing the Antelope: What Animals Can Teach Us About Running and Life
by Bernd Heinrich
Later re-titled as “Why We Run,” I credit this book with setting alight my interest in science. I hated science in high school and I was told that everyone does, it’s boring but you have to do it anyway because STEM education is some guarantee for financial success. Instead, I liked art, running, and animals. Antelopes were my favorite. When I found Racing the Antelope, I was compelled by how the author used science to understand life and the world, including things that I cared about, and the practical implications of studying animal biology so that he could become a better runner.
Sure, he could have written this without any first-person, but it’s so much more memorable that he’s in it. I think about his life lessons all the time, not just because Heinrich declared some trite mantra, but because he told the stories that led me to conclusions that I believe in my heart and brain. Someone needed to bring my heart into this.
The fact that Heinrich included info about his successes and failures as a runner made me trust him more–especially the successes, to be honest, because he really did figure out what works. This guy doesn’t just do science, he lives it, he knows it, he feels it.
On Animals
by Susan Orlean
This collection of essays isn’t about Orlean, but she’s in there and I get a sense of grounding and personhood through her little details. In an essay that’s mostly informational about chickens, she ended it with a story of crying at the vet with her chicken. Because Orlean speaks about animals in positive terms, I find her compassionate, relatable, and open-hearted. Frankly, I wouldn’t trust anyone to talk about animals if they didn’t even understand the creatures well enough to love them. To know is to love, and she knows. She doesn’t gush, she doesn’t anthropomorphize them, but she pays attention to who they are, how and why they differ, and what they mean to people.
Things I know about her now: she has lots of animals and enough land to have them. She once traded a really pretty rooster for a kinder one. When trying to figure out what to call her turkeys – not pets, but not livestock – her husband called them “landscape animals.” She correctly finds donkeys adorable and was surprised to find that a lot of people she interviewed didn’t name their donkeys. These all give depth to the animal discussion, and that’s about as deep as she goes, and about as much as I care about.
Bad Science
by Ben Goldacre
I don’t think this book had much of anything of Ben Goldacre’s life in it, except I recall that he is a doctor. In fact, I almost include this as a counterpoint—it is a great book without much personal stuff included at all. I consider it the most important science book I ever read. It’s about all the different ways someone (a journalist, a PR rep, a scientist, a business owner, a charlatan, etc) can use “science” to make fake stuff sound true.
He does imbue a lot of wit and charm into the pages, though. I remember one passage in response to some unscientific program that suggested children should massage their own carotid arteries. Goldacre responds:
“Children can be disgusting, and they often develop extraordinary talents, but I’ve yet to meet any child who can stimulate his carotid arteries inside his ribcage. That’s probably going to need the sharp scissors that only Mommy can use.”
GREAT LINE.
Support the group!
Thank you to the people who have paid subscriptions, which you can get by clicking “Subscribe” in the brown box above! This newsletter/group is free but I’m very grateful for any support. If you want to contribute with a different amount of money, I have PayPal. If you would like to donate to a 501(c)3 charity instead, might I suggest a $10 donation to Small Town Community Cats (where I got my beloved Bijou) or Wyoming Arts Alliance, which has been generous to me. I’d love it if you could mention me/ANBIP in the note of the donation, just because I’m curious to see if and how much this may result in.
Books that are, in fact, memoirs but have a lot of information in them:
North to the Night : A Spiritual Odyssey in the Arctic
by Alvah Simon
Let’s look at the opposite. This is a memoir in which the author spends a year on a sailboat in remote arctic ice. He frequently stops to deliver a lot of fascinating information about whatever he just saw or did.
Like “then we stopped in Greenland. Here’s the bizarre history of Greenland.” Or “they were all fascinated to see my cat. No one here has cats because it’s too cold.” Except WAY more interesting. Reading this book took forever because I kept stopping and going “wow, that’s fascinating!” So rather than sprinkling personality into a book of information, he used the story as a scaffolding to hold tons of expertly-researched information.
Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life
by Lulu Miller
I haven’t read it but I’ve heard great things and it’s well-reviewed. The description says “Part biography, part memoir, part scientific adventure, Why Fish Don’t Exist reads like a fable about how to persevere in a world where chaos will always prevail.”
Here are other books I haven’t read, but are recommended by Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings:
Two books I've recently enjoyed in audio form — a pair of braided animal memoirs that help their readers understand wild creatures, and the human experience, in novel ways. Somebody put @ericajberry & @aznfusion on a panel together, if it hasn't happened already!
How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imblr
Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear by Erica Berry
Also, I should point out one of the most successful memoirs of today is animal-focused.
H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
I have read this one, and I credit it for helping me finally understand why people read memoirs at all. (Or, maybe there are other reasons I still don’t know. I will never care about actors.) I’ve mostly found memoirs (and especially memoirs made into movies) to be annoyingly pointless, with no climax or resolution. H is for Hawk also doesn’t have much of a climax or resolution, but I finally learned to appreciate that human experiences aren’t always about resolution, but her thoughts and feelings combined with information does stop and make me think about humans’ relationships with animals, other humans, and themselves. I would talk about this at a book club.
How I did it for Carcass: On the Afterlives of Animal Bodies:
(Full disclosure, I’m in edits for Carcass, so stuff might change.)
For many chapters in Carcass, I included a similar level of detail about myself as Orlean did about herself in On Animals. Mostly it was just my thoughts on the situation or some relevant experience. For example, in the Pets chapter, when I talked about cremation, I noted why I was ADAMANT that my beloved cat Venus’s body would not be incinerated.
The “Preservation” chapter was more along the lines of North to the Night, in that I described my experience dismantling a dog and two puppies, and frequently stopped to describe the science of what I was doing, and what could be done with their body parts.
Other chapters still had personality, it just wasn’t much of mine, but of people who work with animals. I visited, in person, a pet processor (pictured), reindeer herders, slaughterhouse workers, seashell collectors, fox fur farmers, a hunter, a pet processor, and more. I’m very glad I did!
I didn’t decide to put this amount of myself in the book because I wanted this amount of myself in the book, that I pre-planned and measured it out, but because these were the experiences I thought would serve the point and the readers the most. If I had more personal experience that was worth reading, I’d include it, and if I had none at all, I wouldn’t include any.
So, if you are shy or modest and want to remain a fly on the wall in your book, your book can still have plenty of personality–just get it from your sources.
June Meeting Info
Here’s a reminder for today’s meeting:
Tuesday, June 25 · 5 PST, 6 MST, 7 Central, 8 EST
Google Meet joining info
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/cas-ioae-tvx