Six Words, No More
MARCH 7, 2008 TAGS:
By Joyce Gemperlein
Illustrations by Jorge Naranjo
Write your own memoir. Be wise. Be witty or reflective. Whatever. The only restriction is that you must boil your life down to six words.
The editors of SMITH magazine issued that challenge to its readers in November 2006. They were flooded with thousands of responses, and a book published a few weeks ago that contains a fraction of them is already a must for toilet libraries and hit the bestseller lists not long after it came out.
The call from SMITH did not use the words “epitaph” or “dead,” but the majority of the six-word memoirs would be perfect engraved on the writers’ tombstones or headlining their obituaries.
Here’s a sampling:
“Somehow, she lived without an iPod.”
“After Harvard, had baby with crackhead.”
“Everyone who loves me is dead.”
“Tequila made her clothes fall off.”
“Afraid of everything. Did it anyway.”
“Never really finished anything, except cake.”
“Not quite what I was planning. . . .”
That last memoir, written by Summer Gaines, a 25-year-old hairdresser in St. Louis, became the name of the book, a $12 paperback published by HarperCollins. In a Feb. 25 “Talk of the Town,” piece in The New Yorker (composed entirely of six-word sentences), Gaines said that the distillation of her life came to her “in two minutes.”
Larry Smith, who founded his online magazine two years ago as “a home for storytelling with a focus on personal narrative,” says the inspiration and creation process took other writers much longer. As most professional writers know, figuring out how to rein a story in usually harder than letting it run free.
Smith and co-editor Rachel Fershleiser credit their fascination with the six-word form of writing to a story about Ernest Hemingway. Supposedly, Hemingway, when challenged to write a six-word story, responded with: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
“Six words are very democratic. Anyone can do it,” says Smith. That, added to a love of obituaries, led to the memoir challenge and the addictive book.
In addition to publishing the memoirs on the website and, now, in book form, Smith and Fershleiser made an informal deal with Twitter.com to deliver one six-word memoirs a day to anyone with a cell phone.
Smith says he and Fershleiser did not look upon the online submissions as a “contest” for entry into Not Quite What I was Planning. Instead, they included a sampling of various types of the six-word memoirs. Only a dozen or so are from well-known people (“Brought it to a boil, often” is from super chef Mario Batali, who is known to live life to the hilt), but most are not.
Some of the memoirs are general; others very specific. Some are definitions of the writer’s life at the moment; others sum it up.
Some celebrate escaping death. For example, “Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends,” is from a 9-year-old thyroid-cancer survivor.
Many of the writers want to be remembered for little things (“She always wore socks to bed”). There are the regret-filled: “I tried. It was not enough.” And the angry: “Ex-wife and contractor now have house.”
And just when readers find themselves chuckling at memoirs like “Anything’s possible with an extension cord” and “The weather is better up here”), up pops a heartbreakingly intimate submission, as in: “So devastated. No babies for me,” “Was father. Boys died. Still sad.”
Finally, one writer sees his life as dictated by the last story of it. His memoir: “I was concerned about my obituary.”
Six-word memoirs are still being accepted -- Smith says there will be a sequel — and displayed at http://smithmag.net/sixwords/
Joyce Gemperlein, a freelance writer based outside Washington, D.C., writes frequently for Obit.
Illustrations by Jorge Naranjo
Write your own memoir. Be wise. Be witty or reflective. Whatever. The only restriction is that you must boil your life down to six words.
The editors of SMITH magazine issued that challenge to its readers in November 2006. They were flooded with thousands of responses, and a book published a few weeks ago that contains a fraction of them is already a must for toilet libraries and hit the bestseller lists not long after it came out.
The call from SMITH did not use the words “epitaph” or “dead,” but the majority of the six-word memoirs would be perfect engraved on the writers’ tombstones or headlining their obituaries.
Here’s a sampling:
“Somehow, she lived without an iPod.”
“After Harvard, had baby with crackhead.”
“Everyone who loves me is dead.”
“Tequila made her clothes fall off.”
“Afraid of everything. Did it anyway.”
“Never really finished anything, except cake.”
“Not quite what I was planning. . . .”
That last memoir, written by Summer Gaines, a 25-year-old hairdresser in St. Louis, became the name of the book, a $12 paperback published by HarperCollins. In a Feb. 25 “Talk of the Town,” piece in The New Yorker (composed entirely of six-word sentences), Gaines said that the distillation of her life came to her “in two minutes.” Larry Smith, who founded his online magazine two years ago as “a home for storytelling with a focus on personal narrative,” says the inspiration and creation process took other writers much longer. As most professional writers know, figuring out how to rein a story in usually harder than letting it run free.
Smith and co-editor Rachel Fershleiser credit their fascination with the six-word form of writing to a story about Ernest Hemingway. Supposedly, Hemingway, when challenged to write a six-word story, responded with: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
“Six words are very democratic. Anyone can do it,” says Smith. That, added to a love of obituaries, led to the memoir challenge and the addictive book.
In addition to publishing the memoirs on the website and, now, in book form, Smith and Fershleiser made an informal deal with Twitter.com to deliver one six-word memoirs a day to anyone with a cell phone.
Smith says he and Fershleiser did not look upon the online submissions as a “contest” for entry into Not Quite What I was Planning. Instead, they included a sampling of various types of the six-word memoirs. Only a dozen or so are from well-known people (“Brought it to a boil, often” is from super chef Mario Batali, who is known to live life to the hilt), but most are not.
Some of the memoirs are general; others very specific. Some are definitions of the writer’s life at the moment; others sum it up.
Some celebrate escaping death. For example, “Cursed with cancer, blessed with friends,” is from a 9-year-old thyroid-cancer survivor. Many of the writers want to be remembered for little things (“She always wore socks to bed”). There are the regret-filled: “I tried. It was not enough.” And the angry: “Ex-wife and contractor now have house.”
And just when readers find themselves chuckling at memoirs like “Anything’s possible with an extension cord” and “The weather is better up here”), up pops a heartbreakingly intimate submission, as in: “So devastated. No babies for me,” “Was father. Boys died. Still sad.”
Finally, one writer sees his life as dictated by the last story of it. His memoir: “I was concerned about my obituary.”
Six-word memoirs are still being accepted -- Smith says there will be a sequel — and displayed at http://smithmag.net/sixwords/
Joyce Gemperlein, a freelance writer based outside Washington, D.C., writes frequently for Obit.
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