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There's a big difference, though, between a personal account designed to contribute to wider understanding and a personal confession calculated to win the confessor money/fame/public absolution. Unfortunately, I fear we're becoming so used to the latter that any writer using the first-person will be read in this mode.
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A freelancer looks to a few self-help books -- Getting Things Done, Never Check E-mail in the Morning, and The Four Hour Work Week -- to see if it helps with productivity. Not so much.
Morgenstern thinks taking time off is crucial; since I'm around tech all the time, she recommends something nature-based. I head for Griffith Park in Los Angeles. Aside from the homeless woman shouting obscenities at a raccoon, it is strangely refreshing. I find a stone bridge where a copse of old trees hang over a brook, a setting so storybook I expect a faerie orgy to break out at any moment. Sitting there, I actually begin to get excited about my workload. I go home and work on my blog, the Nerdist, for an hour and a half—pure output. According to Morgenstern, I have found my "concentration threshold" and am now "on my way to time mastery!" I silently vow that once I have truly mastered the di
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In the American Scholar, there is a very interesting look at how copyright law in France can stifle biographers. From their lack of "public domain" to their law protecting “la loi sur la vie privée” -- "which means that if you do not like what someone says about you, you can sue" -- it can make it very difficult to keep your publisher from getting sued. Hazel Rowley fought many battles for her book Tête-à-Tête: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, including lawsuits from a man who did not dispute what she wrote about him, just didn't like that she did.
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When you plagiarize a story about Christmas, baby Jesus cries. Especially when the only excuse you can give is, "Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of ‘stories to tell that have a message I want to share.’ I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized ... and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience." Look what you did, now the angels are weeping, too.
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Diana Athill's memoir won a Costa book award in it's category, as did some other probably very fine books, but none of those authors really have any chance of being as effortlessly awesome as her.
The USP of the Costa Book award (which before the divorce was known as the Whitbread) is the way it pits nonfiction vs. poetry vs. children's books vs. whatever else came down the spike.
The category winners and some bonus Athill:
Novel: The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
First Novel: The Outcastby Sadie Jones
Poetry: The Broken World by Adam Foulds
Biography: Somewhere Towards the End by Diana Athill
Childrens: Just Henry by Michelle Magorian