Greetings, readers. You may know this month is Undertow’s 7th birthday. On Nov. 1st, I began giving away seven (7) FREE copies. UPDATE: As of this morning, Nov. 4th, there are only two (2) FREE copies left. Keep reading for details. But first, what’s a memoir?
A memoir is a true slice-of-life story
Undertow: My Escape from the Fundamentalism and Cult Control of The Way International is a memoir, a true story of my years spent in a Bible cult. One thing I like about memoir is that it usually (not always) focuses on one major event in your life. It’s not your whole life story (that’s autobiography). In memoir, you include only parts of your experience that relate to the overall theme or lesson you learned during that time in your life. And then, one way or another, you let the reader know how you feel about that now as you look back on it.
In Undertow, I stated its theme in the first chapter: “In the beginning, I only wanted to know, love, and serve God and understand the Bible. What harm could that possibly bring?” Right away you know what the book is about. You know what’s motivating me. Will I get what I wanted? How did that quest turn out? Did I change in some way, did I learn anything by the end of the book?
Writing a memoir
Writing this memoir taught me many things: perseverance, for one, courage, for another. There were times I thought I might not finish it, much less publish it. It’s hard to know when a story is “finished” and scary to make yourself vulnerable by telling a very personal story.
How about you? If you’re thinking of writing a memoir, I say try it. No one but you can write something about your life like you can.
Maybe this will inspire you—my favorite quote about memoir. It’s found in Patricia Hampl’s book, I Could Tell You Stories:
“If we refuse to do the work of creating this personal version of the past, someone else will do it for us. That is the scary political fact. ‘The struggle of man against power,’ Milan Kundera’s hero in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting says, ‘is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’ He refers to willful political forgetting, the habit of nations and those in power (Question Authority!) to deny the truth of memory in order to disarm moral and ethical power. It is an efficient way of controlling masses of people.”
Get your FREE copy of Undertow
Offer is good until November 30, 2023. Limit one per request.
- Fill out the message form here → Contact.
- Include your snail mail address. I will never sell or give away this information. This offer is available ONLY to USA addresses.
- Tell me who the book is for so I can sign it, making it personal.
- I’ll mail you the book via media mail and email you the tracking number.
Undertow is sold at major booksellers. List price: paperback ($24.95), eBook ($9.99). Also order it at Indie bookstores and public libraries.
Next blog post: Nov. 11 – When is International Cult Awareness Day?
Thanks for reading!
Your writer on the wing,
Charlene
