DISCOVERIES

Old Friend From Far Away

The Practice of Writing Memoir

Natalie Goldberg

Free Press: 322 pp., $25

WHY so many memoirs?

“In the center of our speed, in the core of our forward movement,” Natalie Goldberg explains in “Old Friend From Far Away,” “we are often confused and lonely. That’s why we have turned so full-heartedly to the memoir form. We have an intuition that it can save us. Writing is the act of reaching across the abyss of isolation to share and reflect.”

Goldberg believes, in other words, in the memoir as therapy. It is in this spirit that she offers exercises to help the writer open up. “Go,” she writes frequently at the end of her short chapters. “Jump in.” Write. “You are not alone.”

Especially useful are tips for banishing (or embracing) the “monkey mind” -- the voice that says, “my writing is going nowhere. It’s a useless task. But in the middle of the night you realized you should have persevered. When you hear the same tactic on the second day, you don’t buy it.” One beautiful byproduct of the whole endeavor is that we “come into closer relation with ourselves and have compassion for our bungling.”

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The Art of Time in Memoir

Then, Again

Sven Birkerts

Graywolf Press: 196 pp., $12 paper

FOR Sven Birkerts, the memoir is not therapy. The art of the memoir has suffered from the public perception of it as “glorified navel-gazing, more than a little narcissistic, an outgrowth of our talk-show fixation.” The memoirist “deploys many of the same energies of self-interrogation, but does so with the goal of discovering a narrative that will make sense, not just as explanation, but also as dramatization, to a would-be reader.”

What distinguishes memoir from therapy is the “reflective vantage point,” the backward glance. Birkerts helps the reader uncover patterns -- what Henry James called “the figure in the carpet” and Birkerts calls “this demon of an idea.”

As for the elusive truth: “A memoirist takes an enormous risk when she invents or distorts for effect. False emotions have a hollow sound, and while trust is easily shaken, it is very hard to regain.” Memoir will remain a vital form, he concludes, “so long as we believe ourselves to be living in the direction of meaning.”

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The Writing Diet

Write Yourself Right-Size

Julia Cameron

Tarcher/Penguin: 256 pp., $19.95

IT’S true. Often creativity -- or being in love -- causes weight loss. Julia Cameron, who has taught writing workshops and workshops in “creative unblocking” for 25 years, ought to know.

The desire to be creative, once fulfilled, she believes, blocks the need to overeat. “What if words can be consumed instead of calories?” she wonders, in all seriousness. “Calories, after all, are units of energy, and so are words.”

Risking honesty in one’s writing also equips the writer to “be honest elsewhere.” What’s more, “Writing brings motion into our lives.” In the act of writing, we create a kind of mirror -- a deeper understanding of ourselves that helps us to banish what Natalie Goldberg calls the “monkey mind,” the inner critic.

Cameron’s recipe is a little cute, a little over the top, but there’s a hard, clean grain of truth in it that glints up through the marketing and the hype.

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susan.reynolds@latimes.com