Tell Me True: Memoir, History, and Writing a Life

In this landmark collection, Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May have gathered fourteen original essays from award-winning memoirists and historians. They are all storytellers, wrestling with a fascinating gray area where memory intersects with history and where the necessities of narrative collide with mundane facts. and whether the record emerges from archival sources or from personal memory, these writers show how to make the leap to telling a good story—while also telling us true.
“reading each of these superb and provocative essays, readers understand history in the memoir and memoir in the history. What all the writers recognize is that they and their disciplines all deal with the vagaries of memory and how humans construct meaning in the present through memory, however expressed. a superb book. Highly recommended.”
—Choice
Patricia Hampl is the author of three memoirs, including most recently The Florist’s Daughter, as well as other books of literary nonfiction and poetry. Elaine Tyler May has written several books on twentieth-century American history. Both are regents professors at the University of Minnesota. Contributors: André Aciman, Matt Becker, June Cross, Carlos Eire, Helen Epstein, Samuel G. Freedman, Patricia Hampl, Fenton Johnson, Alice Kaplan, Annette Kobak, Michael
Patrick MacDonald, Elaine Tyler May, Cheri Register, D. J. Waldie.