Sari Botton

And so the norms of how...

relationships are how people are represented or presented in society those rules were written by men in novels and memoirs and we have to as women just kind of show up and say no this is how our life is this is this is what our day-to-day life is um

but also the meat and potatoes of memoir, like the people who really read memoir and love it, they want to find identification with,

They want to see their own experience reflected in memoirs.

And in order to do that, you can't just be writing about like huge, you know, anomalous life events, winning the lottery, your mother was murdered or, you know, like these outstanding experiences.

The best of memoir is not about exceptional experiences.

It illuminates the mundane.

It takes the mundane of life and reinterprets it.

It gives it meaning.

It shows it in a way that people can step in and say, oh, she's describing a phenomenon that is familiar to me that I never realized was profound.

But it is profound because it is part of being human.

And so women need to show up and say, hey, our experience is part of being human, too.

It's not just the way that, you know, John Cheever presented things or Hemingway or, you know, it's like there's more to life.

There's women's experience.

And we need to show up and say, this is what it's like to be me.

And other people can then say, Hey, that's what it's like to be me too.

That's what readers can see.

Um,

Yeah, I think I say it better in the book.

It's a little more articulate about it in the book.