The Memoir Club

This was a book about how the lives of a group of women is interwoven together by the memoir club and how they come together in support of one another.

This book is heartbreakingly honest and breathtakingly affirming of life. This is the kind of book I keep in my library and read once a year.

I really enjoyed this book. It was a nice read from the people who didn't know each other and how they came to find support in each other through their memoir class. I'm not one for much fiction, but I would recommend this book to others.

I really enjoyed Laura Kalpakian's latest book. This latest novel is written in such a way that each chapter could be self contained but since the author has the uncanny ability to make you really interested in the heroine(s), I eagerly await the next chapter which carries on each heroine's separate story line. She has several heroines, each with their own story. It is my hope to see some of the heroines in either future books or short stories published in magazines. I think Laura Kalpakian is one of the most insightful feminist writerers writing today and a must read for women of all age groups.

This book was my first introduction to Kalpakian and I purchased it for two reasons...I was drawn to the beautiful cover and I was enticed by the premise of six women taking a college extension course in memoir writing and, consequently, forming friendships beyond the classroom. I had thoughts of two of my other favorite female "bonding" books -- The Saving Graces by Patricia Gaffney and Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik.I think this book started off much slower than the two books I've already mentioned but once it got going, I simply could not put it down. I actually stayed up reading until 2:30AM because I couldn't go to sleep without knowing how it would end. It's much deeper than others I've read with similar premises yet Kalpakian doesn't dwell on the gloom and doom of some of their pasts. She instead celebrates their futures.You definitely don't fall in love with these characters even though they're well drawn out by the author. Perhaps they're too real -- like anyone else you might meet in your daily life. There seems to be more meat in their stories (their memoirs) giving the author the ability to flesh them out without being too obvious about it.Through the memoirs they're writing in their extension class, the reader gets to glimpse their past lives and it's a great way to go back in time within the confines of the book. The most interesting thing the women in the memoir class learn is that "the memoir is not and should never be confused with the truth...As a result, truth belongs to the teller." So, while the memoir is the "teller's" truth, it might not essentially be "the truth." While writing these memoirs, each of these women will come upon secrets in their past that might not be as truthful as they want their pasts to be.I highly recommend this book and encourage the reader to join these women as they delve into their pasts and form a new future together at the same time.I would, however, be remiss if I didn't mention something that almost ruined this book for me. In the first sentence of the "Acknowledgments", the author thanks her editor for her "wise editorial eye." My advice to her editor is twofold...get a pair of eyeglasses and go back and get a refresher course in English grammar. There are no less than twenty different errors in this book. When I hit the first one or two, I shook my head and moved on. When there got to be more than one on the same page, I got angry. If we as readers are willing to spend good money on a hardcover book, I realize that the publisher can't always guarantee that we'll love the story but they should be promising a well-edited book. Shame on you St. Martin's Press.