A memoir for me means a person’s life story; if I was going to write my actual life story, I would condense this entire marriage into a footnote.

If a memoir is to achieve literature, it has to have an organizing principle, it has to have an idea, it has to have something that will be of value to the disinterested reader. And that doesn’t happen so often, because most people who are writing memoirs are not writers...The ability to turn yourself into a persona who is able to generate drama, narrative drive, conflict, all the things that are required, is very hard, and not too many people achieve it.

Neither is a memoir the same as a biography, which aims for the most objective, factual account of a life. A memoir, as I understand it, makes no pretense of denying its subjectivity. Its matter is one person’s memory, and memory by nature is selective and colored by emotion. Others who participated in the events I describe will no doubt remember some details differently, though I hope we would agree on the essential truths. I have taken no liberties with the past as I remember it, used no fictional devices beyond reconstructing conversations from memory. I have not blended characters, or bent chronology to convenience. And yet I have tried to tell a good story.

A man who leaves memoirs, whether well or badly written, provided they be sincere, renders a service to future psychologists and writers, giving them not only a faithful picture, but likewise human documents that may be relied upon.

After I retired in 1940, I have been urged by friends and family, to put down on paper, my many experiences in the vocation which I had adopted, the hotel and restaurant field. I know that a Memoir [is] generally written [about] services to mankind, I can lay no claim to hotel and restaurant field. I know that a memoir is written about men or woman, that [have] achieved greatness through services to mankind, such as writers, scientists or industrialists. I can make no claim to such recognition, however, as my services [have] been required in higher places, which only a few get a chance to accomplish, many in our line of business often remain at the same jobs their whole life without having the opportunity to advance themselves to higher offices. Many have tried, but only a few are chosen. I have been fortunate of being one of the few, as I at an early age of 29 became manager of one of the finest resort hotels in Norway, after spending nine years learning, first the kitchen, then the dining room, then the front office and so on. It was a wise man that made this statement: "Do not slight the man on your way up, for you will meet him on your way down". How true, for after having been on the top and as you grow older one begins to slide back. Edgar Guest has written, that it takes a heap of living to make a home, and its from the heap, that I have plucked the scraps.

Unlike the memoirist, who promises to tell the truth, the fiction writer says upfront, “I am going to tell you a lie, but at the end you will feel that it is true.” He or she is a kind of magician who makes sure you know that the flames are only an illusion before letting you burn your fingers in them. Every event, every character, must be made real by the author’s skill. It is a tricky balancing act, because the fiction writer aims for simultaneous belief and disbelief: a belief in the essential trueness of this world—that these people could exist, that these events could have happened—with a full consciousness of their falsehood…fiction’s role is essentially persuasive. It forces you to start from a position of disbelief by announcing its own fictitiousness. Then it transforms you into the literary equivalent of a sinner seeing the light, a prodigal son whose faith is stronger for having doubted and been redeemed. You don’t question a memoir; you believe it’s true when you pick it up. But you are told from the beginning that fiction is untrue. It depends on its own power to convince you in spite of this knowledge, and that belief, when it comes, is a complete transformation. And this is why we need fiction.

When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do — well, that's Memoirs.

When you write a memoir you have to think about your responsibility to your audience that you'd be completely honest, and to people in your life. Your honesty is going to affect them.

Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.

Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us.

Storytelling is the way that unarticulated memory becomes art, becomes artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt again, becomes free. Empires have been raised & razed on much less.

Memory is the diary that chronicles things that never happened or couldn't possibly have happened.

Storytelling is the way that unarticulated memory becomes art, becomes artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt again, becomes free. Empires have been raised & razed on much less. There is nothing so agonizing, or so dangerous, as memory unexpressed, unexplored, unexplained & unexploded. Grief is the grenade that always goes off.

The chronicler, who was present at these events and once more recalls what he witnessed, inscribes his experiences, in an act of self-mutilation, onto his own body. In the writing, he becomes the martyred paradigm of the fate Providence has in store for us, and, though still alive, is already in the tomb that his memoirs represent.