Signifying Nothing

“ I hate confessional memoirs. There are valuable memoirs, no doubt. But you have to have a life worth talking about. Not every experience is valuable. Literature, to my mind, starts from some sort of personal space - and then it has to go beyond that. Whatever experience you may have had, whatever stories you might have to tell about yourself, they have to be transformed into something that’s meaningful beyond yourself. And because it’s transformed at some point, it stops being about you. The person in my fiction is not my life, so we can talk about it. If it were my life, what would you have to say about it? Memoir is not subject to interpretation. That is antithetical to literature. ” -

Aleksandar Hemon, author of Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project in an interview with BookForum.

i couldn’t agree with this more.