The Art of Memoir
Karr writes about truth-telling with humour and rigour. Her insistence that memoir is not autobiography but a selective, shaped story helped me understand what belongs on a personal blog and what stays in the drawer.
Reading room
Books that shaped how I write
Titles I reopen when a draft stalls or when I need permission to write small.
I dip into these rather than reading cover to cover each year. One paragraph from Dillard or Karr often unlocks a stuck story.
The Writing Life
Short, luminous essays on discipline and wonder. I reread the chapter on keeping a schedule whenever I convince myself I am too busy to write.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
Chee bridges the personal and the political without losing intimacy. His pieces on turning experience into fiction and essay alike expanded my sense of what a life story can do.
The Emigrants
Sebald taught me that photographs, digression, and quiet melancholy can carry enormous narrative weight. A masterclass in writing about displacement and memory.
Bird by Bird
Practical, funny, and forgiving. Lamott's "shitty first drafts" concept remains the best antidote to perfectionism I know.
Invisible Cities
Not memoir, but essential for anyone writing about urban life. Calvino proves that a city is as much imagination as infrastructure — a useful reminder in Singapore's dense landscape.
How I use this shelf
I do not read these cover to cover every year. Instead, I keep them within reach and dip in when a draft stalls or when I need a model for structure. Sometimes a single paragraph unlocks an entire story — the way Dillard describes light, or the way Karr handles family complexity with compassion and clarity.
If you have recommendations that belong in a reading room like this, I would genuinely like to hear them. Send a note through the contact page with the title and a sentence about why it mattered to you.