becoming a writer

Here's a wonderful quote about writing memoir, from an article in the NYT: About 10 years ago, in graduate school, I was talking to an older poet. He told me about his childhood, which had been as “other” as my own. Glimpsing the bewildering strangeness of his formative years, I was suddenly struck that he had had to become a writer — or suffer the consequences.Recognizing that necessity in him, I recognized it in myself, too. What else could one do with such a tangled formation but transform it into writing? Not in order to untangle it and tie up loose ends. Not to say, neatly, “This is who I am, and that is why.” Not, finally, to reduce experience to a formula, but rather to convert confusion into curiosity, to face questions that don’t have easy answers, and to create spaces in which others, be they students or readers, might do the same. 
MIRANDA MELLIS