Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past [Paperback]

Written with elegance, warmth, and humor, this highly original teaching memoir by William Zinsser--renowned bestselling author ofOn Writing Wellgives you the tools to organize and recover your past, and the confidence to believe in your life narrative. His method is to take you on a memoir of his own: 13 chapters in which he recalls dramatic, amusing, and often surprising moments in his long and varied life as a writer, editor, teacher, and traveler. Along the way, Zinsser pauses to explain the technical decisions he made as he wrote about his life. They are the same decisions you'll have to make as you write about your own life: matters of selection, condensation, focus, attitude, voice, and tone.

William Zinsserbegan his career with theNew York Herald Tribuneand wrote regularly for leading magazines. His 17 books, in addition toOn Writing Well, includeWriting to Learn,American Places,Mitchell & Ruff: An American Profile in Jazz,andEasy to Remember: The Great American Songwriters and Their Songs. He taught writing at Yale and at the New School. William Zinsser died in 2015.