Good Memoir Comes From Saying What Can’t Be Said

At the 2017 Bay Area Book Festival, Literary Hub went backstage to interview authors and panelists on a wide range of topics: the personal, the professional, and the political. In the below video, Dani Shapiro, who visited the festival for a panel discussion with Hannah Tinti entitled “My Literary Friend,” wonders whether she would have written her memoir Slow Motion if she’d had social media at the time, and discusses the impact that insta-sharing (and insta-gratification) could have on our writing—or our not writing, as the case may be. (Those of you who found this video via Twitter, welcome! You’re not alone.)

Dani Shapiro: “Adrienne Rich once said that it is that which is under the pressure of concealment that explodes into poetry. So if you’re on Twitter and Facebook and sharing there, there’s no pressure of concealment. And I think good memoir comes out of that place, it comes out of it can’t be said, it can’t be said, it can’t be said, so now I want to try to say it.”