You should write your own story,” Randy, my therapist, says to me.

I’ve been in therapy about a year. I slouch on the blue couch in Randy’s Atlanta office, lean my head back, and stare at the ceiling, nervous to meet his gaze. I put my feet, in red leather Reeboks, on his coffee table. This table, this couch, his office—they’re all designed to comfort his clients.

But I don’t feel comfortable. I want to say to him: Write about myself? You’re the one who must be crazy! Why would I want to write about myself? I want to...

I begin writing my first novel while living in Texas, several years before moving to Georgia—before therapy with Randy. One afternoon, I simply set up a card table in my apartment in a restored Victorian iron-front building in Galveston’s Strand District. I place my portable Smith Corona typewriter on it. I open a ream of cheap, canary yellow paper, certainly a metaphor (I see now) for my lack of self-confidence at the time. As much as I want to write a novel, I’m equally sure I’ll fail—uncertain, back then, whether I have a voice with which to write,...

I recently worked on a memoir essay about a crush I had on a boy in high school, Jamie, whom I dated on and off for a few years. Having written two dark, full-length memoirs, I envisioned this piece as a light-hearted romp of teenage love and angst—something I could probably crank out in a day or two. How difficult could it be to write a simple little love story—and not even a story of true love, but of puppy love? To add a modicum of complication, I included another girl, Kathy, whom my boyfriend also dated. Long...

Plot is as important in memoir as it is in fiction. In fiction, plot is invented; in nonfiction, it is discovered.

In a novel, you invent each scene, each episode, fabricating all sorts of trouble for your main character in order to thwart her or his wishes and desires. You create antagonists with whom your protagonist engages in conflict. You concoct roadblock after roadblock that your protagonist battles in order to reach the end of her or his plotted journey.

In nonfiction, we scrutinize our lived lives to discover our plots. We select only those significant, relevant details that enhance...

Back when I began my writing career, one of my teachers told me, “Voice is everything.” I knew he was right—but I also knew that my fictional voice, regardless of character or point of view, frequently sounded false and strained. So after those several unfinished novels I told you about, I switched to memoir and finally discovered a voice in which I could tell my own story. Ironically, what I also discovered is that memoir, like fiction, offers a range of possible voices from which to choose. A voice that sounds harmonious in one of your memoirs might sound...

One night, unable to sleep, I watch an autumn moon framed in my bedroom window in Michigan. It pauses, large and luminous, as if hovering just on the other side of the glass. I am startled: I haven’t noticed the moon for a long time, haven’t followed its journey across its home in the night sky. Now seemingly so close, so intimate, I almost believe, if I breathe deeply, I’ll be able to smell it. I sense it—cool, heavy—anchoring the sky, anchoring me, with blue dreams of the universe.

But the moon is not blue.

What color, objectively,...

I love red shoes. Always have, always will. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t own at least one pair—usually more. An early, preschool photograph, taken in Puerto Rico, shows my feet adorned in red strapped sandals. Currently, I count seven pairs in my closet, including red Simple tennis shoes. Another pair, shiny leather huaraches, I ordered from the Sundance catalogue. For my birthday, Marc bought me red Mary Janes with pink polka dots. In winter, I wear red clogs embossed with flowers, or red suede Earth shoes with patent leather toes. For summer, I recently purchased canvas...

One spring afternoon in 1996, I was sitting at my desk working on a novel (one, to this day, I’ve never completed), when the phone rang. It was David Fenza, executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (awp), notifying me that my memoir had won their Award Series in Creative Nonfiction. The award, he told me, included a cash prize plus publication with the University of Georgia Press.

Me? A winner? There must be a mistake, I thought, someone playing a joke. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I suspect I sounded both overjoyed and...

Until I write the past it flickers in my mind’s eye, ghostly, like an old newsreel. In black-and-white photos of my Russian ancestors—photos that survived a boat trip from the Old Country to the New World—faces fade as if they’ve aged while sitting in cardboard boxes. Even color Polaroids of volcanic mountains, snapped when I lived in the West Indies, seem cast in a pinkish sheen. As chemicals disintegrate, this part of my life seems tinted by raspberry-colored fingernail polish. I leaf through family albums, but no one appears distinct. No one seems ever to have been fully...