Memoir Reflections

 I enjoyed the memoir by Jeanette Winterson, I think that by the end it's pretty clear she had been raised by a person with mental problems, bordering on crazy if not already pretty far gone. I think the fact that she was able to write out the memoir coherently indicates she's pretty grounded in the real world, and her tone and humor give me the sense that she fully understands how crazy her adoptive mother is. One of the most interesting parts was in the end of the PDF when she recalls the memory of a mystery woman approaching her adoptive mother and being unsure even to this day of both whether it really happened, and whether or not that was her real mother. I imagine that that had to be difficult to live and maybe even harder to come to terms with. It reminded of what I drew from the other reading, The Art of Memoir, which was that one shouldn't hark on getting specific details right when writing a memoir (unless they are critical to the point of what one is trying to convey), since our minds tend to forget a lot of small details and/or completely overwrite them with something from the imagination (different color of bags & clothing, reasons for being at a place, etc.). I thought Winterson's unsure-edness of her own memory didn't get in the way of telling an impactful and interesting story, which definitely gives me more confidence when it comes to writing my own memoirs - at least on the matter of "getting everything right", which recently I've felt more and more of having less importance when it comes to telling a good story/entertaining the reader.