8th Grade Memoirs

This week, memoirs absolutely rained down on the 8th grade! As part of a yearlong focus on narrative writing, 8th graders this fall are writing super-short memoirs (100 words max) and they’re also reading book-length memoirs. At the end of the term, students will present a short book talk on the memoir that they chose to read.

8th graders had a handful of class periods to try out various memoirs from the SGS library (some old, some newly acquired) and see what caught their interest. What an awful, wonderful decision to have to make! How could someone decide between Michelle Zauner’s heartrending story of loss and identity (Crying in H Mart), Tara Westover’s gripping tale of escaping her destiny (Educated), George M. Johnson’s powerful queer manifesto (All Boys Aren’t Blue), or Patti Smith’s lyrical coming-of-age story of art, friendship, and New York City (Just Kids)? Impossible to decide! And yet they did! 

Twenty-four different titles were chosen, reflecting a range of identities and experiences: undocumented teens, closeted young people, misfits and outcasts, famous athletes and comedians, people from rough families and loving families, activists, fighters, spies, ballerinas, poets, survivors. The best memoirs reveal how to make sense of life; all of these books abound in truth and wisdom and beauty. As the very great Mary Karr says, writing about what makes memoir so thunderously meaningful: “Everybody has a past, and every past spawns fierce and fiery emotions about what it means. Nobody can be autonomous in making choices today unless she grasps how she’s being internally yanked around by stuff that came before.” Yes! Read on, 8th grade!