Book excerpt: Baring the Truth in Your Memoir When you write a memoir or personal essay, you dare to reveal the truths of your experience: about yourself, and about others in your life. How do you expose long-guarded secrets and discuss bad behavior? How do you gracefully portray your family members, friends, spouses, exes, and children without damaging your relationships? How do you balance your respect for others with your desire to tell the truth? In The Truth of Memoir, best-selling memoirist Kerry Cohen provides insight and guidelines for depicting the characters who appear in your work with honesty and compassion. You'll learn how to choose which details to include and which secrets to tell, how to render the people in your life artfully and fully on the page, and what reactions you can expect from those you include in your work--as well as from readers and the media. Featuring over twenty candid essays from memoirists sharing their experiences and advice, as well as exercises for writing about others in your memoirs and essays, The Truth of Memoir will give you the courage and confidence to write your story--and all of its requisite characters--with truth and grace. "Kerry Cohen's The Truth of Memoir is a smart, soulful, psychologically astute guide to first-person writing. She reveals everything you want to know--but were afraid to ask--about telling your life story." --Susan Shapiro, author of eight books including Only As Good as Your Word, and co-author of The Bosnia List