Friday, December 26, 2008

Six-Word Memoirs

One of books I'd asked for and got for Christmas was Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure . Can you describe your life in six words? While flipping thru the book and reading some of the entries aloud Christmas day, we decided to give it a try and post our own six-word memoirs as our status on our facebook pages. I thought I'd extend the challenge to readers of this blog and friends on facebook. To help you out here are few examples from the book:

Journalist Chuck Klosterman: "Nobody cared, then they did. Why?"
9 year old Hannah Davies: "Cursed with cancer. Blessed by friends"
Chef Mario Batali: "Brought it to a boil, often"
George Saunders: "Started small, grew, peaked, shrunk, vanished"
Amy Sedaris: "Mushrooms. Clowns. Wands. Five. Wig. Thatched"


Questions arise when you start trying to come up with a phrase to describe your whole life and share it with others. How honest do I want to be, do I want to be funny, philosophical, serious? For me, it was actually easier than I thought it would be. I came up with a couple quickly:
"Life ain't fair, so what, enjoy" and a variation of that "Life ain't fair, get over it" but even though these do a pretty good job of describing my general outlook on life they're not quite it, but they did lead to a little introspection that resulted in this one "42 years later, it still hurts". But as true as that one is and how much it has to do with the first two, it doesn't really tell enough of the story. Start over, not really thinking about it, six words pop into my head. So here it is, my life boiled down to six words.

"Faith, Hope, Love, Buffy, Angel, Family"

Give it a try. Hope you'll post what you come up with.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow, Mark, this caused some introspection that I didn't really like. It is hard to decide if how you feel about yourself is also how others "see" you.

Here is what I decided in about 5 min. Maybe I could do better given some time: "Really just wanted to do right"

Mark Deal said...

Jennifer, I like that.
Here are some of the responses I've gotten from my facebook page"
Jeff - Veni, Vidi Maltese Falcon many times.
Latisha - Endeavoring to not stand idly by
Natasha - More than enough, but still hungry.