Memoir: How I Read, Write and Use It

Helen Epstein

ago 2019 · Plunkett Lake Press

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This is an essay for students of memoir. Making meaning in writing memoir is similar to creating narrative in psychotherapy. What differentiates memoir from that work is the public nature of the literary product, its aim to document fact, elucidate memory, separate it from fantasy as far as possible and render lived rather than imagined experience. In addition to literary and healing qualities, memoirs serve a crucial historical role. As the Polish poet and memoirist Czeslaw Milosz writes: "Unless we can relate it to ourselves personally, history will always be more or less of an abstraction... every family archive that perishes, ever account book that is burnt, reinforces classifications and ideas at the expense of reality..."

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Born in Prague in 1947, Helen Epstein grew up in New York City, where she graduated from Hunter College High School in 1965. She studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and became a journalist after the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia of 1968 when her personal account was published in the Jerusalem Post. She became a university correspondent for that newspaper while still an undergraduate. Subsequently, she studied at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and began freelancing for diverse publications including the New York Times.

Her profiles of legendary musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz, Leonard Bernstein and Yo-Yo Ma are collected in Music Talks that, like Children of the Holocaust and Where She Came From, has been translated into several other languages. She herself is the translator of Heda Kovály's Under A Cruel Star and Vlasta Schönová's Acting in Terezín. Her biographies of Joseph Papp and Tina Packer grew out of her journalistic work. She has an active speaking career and has lectured at a wide variety of venues in Europe, and North and South America. She blogs for The Arts Fuse, a New England cultural web site.