I Could Tell You Stories
Subtitle: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; W.W. Norton
Published: June 1, 1999
Language: eng
Number of pages: 229
ISBN-13: 9780393047387
First sentence: Years ago, in another life, I woke to look out the smeared window of a Greyhound bus I had been riding all night, and in the still-dark morning of a small Missouri river town where the driver had made a scheduled stop at a grimy diner, I saw below me a stout middle-aged woman in a flowered housedress turn and kiss full on the mouth a godlike young man with golden curls.
Description: Memoir, that landscape bordered by memory and imagination, has become the signature genre of our age. In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl moves back and forth between a series of story-like recollections and essays in which she considers how she has been "enchanted or bedeviled" by autobiographical writing - her own and others'.