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    It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure
    It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure
    It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure
    Ebook196 pages1 hour

    It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure

    By Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser

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    About this ebook

    Thousands of people around the world responded to SMITH Magazine's call for six-word memoirs. Following up on the smashing success of the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning, here are more memoirs from Sarah Silverman, Junot Diaz, Neil Patrick Harris, Suze Orman, Gay Talese, Tony Hawk, Amy Tan—and hundreds of never-before-published writers.

    Funny and bittersweet, witty and wild, or downright tragic, these addictive life stories are both monumental and miniscule. Six-word memoirs have become a global phenomenon, offering anyone and everyone a telling peek at humanity and a chance to find the writer within.

    "Father: ‘Anything but journalism.' I rebelled." —Malcolm Gladwell

    "Live man's life in woman's body!" —Diane von Furstenberg

    "Met wife at her bachelorette party." —Eddie Matz

    "The miserable childhood leads to royalties." —Frank McCourt

    "I never checked my lottery ticket." —Casey Burra

    "Shiny head. Hippie hair. Shiny head." —Wally Lamb

    "Bipolar, no two ways about it." —Jason Owen

    "So would you believe me anyway?" —James Frey

    "Can't look at heart donor's picture." —Tonia Hall

    "Healed with steel, then got real." —Dr. Mehmet Oz

    "I still practice my Oscar speech." —Jennifer Labbienti

    "I've done it all except hear." —Marlee Matlin

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJan 5, 2010
    ISBN9780061963483
    It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure
    Author

    Larry Smith

    LARRY SMITH is an adjunct associate professor of economics at the University of Waterloo and a recipient of the University of Waterloo’s Distinguished Teacher Award. During his longstanding tenure, Smith has taught and counselled more than 23,000 students on the subject of their careers, representing more than 10 percent of UW’s alumni. Smith has worked with more than 500 teams of student entrepreneurs, advising them as they have created companies of significant size and success across industries as broad-reaching as communications, software, robotics, entertainment, design and real estate. Smith is also president of Essential Economics Corporation, an economic consulting practice that serves a wide range of public and private clients. “Why You Will Fail to have a Great Career,” his TEDx Talk based on his experience counselling students, has been viewed by over six million people.

    Read more from Larry Smith

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    Reviews for It All Changed in an Instant

    4/5

    86 ratings15 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Did not meet expectations. The first book was better.
    • 4/5
      Following up on Not Quite What I Planned, this book contains a number of six-word phrases and sentences meant to summarize a life. Entries range from famous authors and performers to obscure folks who submitted something in response to this writing prompt. Everything is edited by SMITH magazine, who started this idea of six-word memoirs. The editing is quite clever at times, so that one page will contain two complementary or contradictory memoirs, such as, "Dad died. Mum died. I'm next." as the only memoir on a page with "Mom's dead. Dad's dead. I'm free." Speaking of clever, many of the memoirs are, with puns or ironic comedy. Others are deeply serious and touch on tough subjects like cancer and suicide. Still others are very fluffy, and many comment on how much sex the author did or did not have. A few submitters include photographs or illustrations with their memoirs. The book ends more information about certain entrants' lives with a paragraph or so providing for each featured. In some cases this is helpful to clarify, but I still found some of the non-famous entries to be a little perplexing because six words wasn't enough to explain. Having an extra mini-biography of folks like The Amazing Kreskin or Bob Barker also seemed a bit unnecessary because readers will know who they are. For whatever reason, I didn't enjoy this book quite as much as the previous one; maybe it's because a one-trick pony isn't as exciting once you've seen the one trick already.
    • 5/5
      A life distilled in six words.
    • 4/5
      Mine: "Always gotta be better than myself."
    • 5/5
      Any of the Six-Word Memoirs books would serve essentially the same function in the classroom and I would imagine that the teen one would be especially appropriate for a secondary classroom, but this is the only one I own. The notion of the Six-Word Memoir can be applied in the classroom in so many ways. The power of language becomes clear when six words can be used to tell intricate stories. It would be very intriguing to see what students wrote for their own six-word memoirs, and as the topics are as varied as the authors, this text covers many subjects. Memoirs on various themes could be introduced or paired with texts and would be easily found thanks to the subject index in the back of the book. Also, this book could be used as inspiration for an assignment where students must write a six-word memoir from the point of view of a character in another text.
    • 5/5
      I love this series. It's a fast read--but one that you will dip back into often as you begin to challenge yourself to think in sixes.
    • 3/5
      Although not a typical read for me, I enjoyed this diverse collection of 6 word memoirs. It was a great book to fill little spaces of time; I found myself reaching for it to read a few pages while making dinner, on hold, while on the plane...some of the entries were certainly much more memorable than others, but it was a fun read. I liked the touch of adding a few more detailed entries for some of the six word entries, but most of them read like advertisements for the artists or writers in the book. I would have preferred more info about the entries that made me interested, not more info about the more famous entries.
    • 5/5
      I got this through the Early Reviewer program, and I was so excited! It is amazing how much can be conveyed through six words. Some are sad, others funny, and reading some I thought it could have been a description of my own life. A very enjoyable book.
    • 4/5
      Hilarious. Tear-jerking. Whimsical. Heartbreaking. A treat.And now I see that a review has to be at least 25 words long to count; so I'm adding more here so that my clever, clever review will count.
    • 4/5
      A wonderful book to have lying around the house as it is easy to pick up & browse, and can be quite entertaining. This book works best for me when I knew the person (recognized famous names) because i could tie their sentence to their life and it made sense. Some of the unknown or lesser known (to me) authors submitting had less fufilling sentences because I had no context to put their quote in, however, I would sometimes be moved to google these folks and learn more about them.Some sentences are just deliciously clever &/or amusing & work well as stand alones.All in all I'd recommend this as a good pick-up for the more "novelty" category of book- those books that may not be serious but are pleasant to have lying around for idle moments.
    • 5/5
      This book is fantastic. I bought myself a copy of the first one, Not Quite What I Was Planning, after hearing about it online, and loved it, then took it around and showed it to everyone I knew, then took it around again and annoyed them all with how much I loved it. But the first time they loved it, too.The premise of the books is obviously to write your own life story in just six words (see more here), a practice inspired by a famous legend about Ernest Hemingway. He was challenged, it’s said, to write a novel in six words. His response? “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Also according to the legend, he once called it his best work. It certainly hit me harder than The Old Man and the Sea.The best thing about these books, though (there are currently four of them out) is that the writers actually are “famous & obscure.” In It All Changed in an Instant, you’ll see memoirs attributed to Somebodies like Michael Moore and Isabel Allende right next to ones by people you’ve never heard of. Even better than the best part, these people-you-have-never-heard-of write the best ones! Anyone, literally anyone, can submit a memoir to SMITH for consideration. I myself have done a few. Just head on over to the link I supplied above and give it a go. As The New Yorker said in their six-word review, “You could spend a lifetime brainstorming.” Five stars.P.S.- it is my advice to take these a few at a time for best effect. After a while, as with all little-this-and-that books, they tend to blend together if you read too many. And seriously, take your copy around and share it. People will love you more.
    • 3/5
      Perfect for what everyone is calling the "twitter generation", this book both made me laugh and cry in its simplicity when one's memoirs had to be truncated down to six words and only six words. I've tried doing this as an exercise myself and it's very difficult to get one's life down in six words, so I do have to give props to the various authors who managed to do it. This book is both inspiring and self-deprecating, perfect for today's recent high school or college graduate. Would definitely make a nice gift to that age group!(crossposted to goodreads)
    • 5/5
      This fun book takes its place on my shelf among many others of the genre. John Train’s “Remarkable” series heads the list – True Remarkable Occurrences and Remarkable Names of Real People, for example, have a hilarity about them, which sometimes causes roars of laughter or a bout of goose bumps. This little volume does all that and more.The premise is simple: famous and unknown writers submitted six-word biographies to Smith Magazine. I have so many favorites, but here are a few:“Books then. Books now. Occasionally life.” –Nancy Pearl“Heard some Shakespeare. Never went back.” –Casey O’Toole“Everything I touch turns to mold.” –Lisa Anne Auerbach“I have to constantly reinvent myself.” –Terry McMillanAnd, of course, I could not resist making up one of my own: “Read, write, listen, love, and live.”Lots of fun for a rainy afternoon. 5 stars--Jim, 2/18/10
    • 5/5
      I was sent an advance-reader copy of this book to review for an online library site. Good thing. Under normal circumstances I would have never picked it up and I would have missed out on a suprising, clever read. This is actually the fourth book in a series that started as an experiment on online magazine. They challenge people to tell their memoir in just six words. It's telling, startling, amusing, and frank. It won't take you long to finish but the "stories" will stick with you.
    • 2/5
      I read the previous edition of this collection and was underwhelmed by the 6 word memoirs. I know that it is not easy to do, but the majority of them are not very compelling. This volume is no different than the first. A few are funny, a few sad, one or two insightful, but most are just nothing. The biggest problem is not knowing who 98% of these people are. Memoirs like these would have much more impact if we knew who these people were. I obviously don't need to know their whole life story, which would undermine the whole point of the book, but there should be something else.Great idea, weak execution.

    Book preview

    It All Changed in an Instant - Larry Smith

            It All

    Changed

    in an                  

    Instant    

    More Six-Word Memoirs by

          Writers Famous & Obscure

                From SMITH Magazine

                      Edited by Rachel Fershleiser

                            and Larry Smith

    Contents

    Cover

    Title Page

    Introduction

    Begin Reading

    Selected Bios, Backstories, Correspondence, and Conversations

    Also from SMITH Magazine

    Index

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    Introduction

    For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

    —Ernest Hemingway, American writer

    It all changed in an instant.

    —Candis Sykes, accounting-group leader

    and American writer

    Legend has it that the short-short story came about in a bar bet when Ernest Hemingway was challenged to write a novel in only six words. We’ll probably never know whether the anecdote is factual or apocryphal, but we do know this: the challenge works. Three years ago, on the storytelling Web site SMITH Magazine, we gave the classic form a contemporary twist. In these confessional times, we wondered if people could use six words to tell the true story of their own lives. Since then, more than 250,000 six-word memoirs have been submitted to SMITH Magazine (SMITHMag.net) and its younger cousin, SMITH Teens (SMITHteens.com).

    We’ve published three books of these life stories so far, Not Quite What I Was Planning, Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, and I Can’t Keep My Own Secrets. The response from readers, writers, librarians, teachers, artists, parents, and children has blown us away. Preachers and rabbis alike have embraced six-word prayers. In hospitals and shelters, from after-school programs to speed dating, six-word memoirs have been used to ease communication, foster understanding, and break the ice. A SMITH contributor who goes by the screen nameMiandering documented her year of traveling the globe in a series of more than 100 six-word memoirs submitted one by one — Sticky rice at every meal. Yum (a great start in Thailand) to Wet flip-flops. Shiny linoleum. Bad combination (a tough break in Malaysia). Teachers from kindergarten to graduate school have found the six-word memoir an inspiring writing lesson. In a third-grade classroom in New Jersey, we heard Life is better in soft pajamas and one student’s precocious Zen observation: Tried surfing on a calm day.

    Like our first book, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure, the one you’re holding offers a mix of bestselling memoirists like the late Frank McCourt (The miserable childhood leads to royalties) and debut writers like Jennifer Labbienti ("I still practice my Oscar speech"). There are stories from the iconic and visionary Gloria Steinem (Life is one big editorial meeting) and the unfamous and practical Joy Zuercher (Can’t reach top shelves, married tall). We’re confident you’ll find all our storytellers equally worthwhile, but if being published alongside Pulitzer Prize winners like Junot Diaz and Tony Kushner validates any aspiring authors, all the better.

    And just as we like to balance populist and aspirational, we see six words as both complete and open-ended. It’s plenty to tell an entire story, but it’s often just the start. We’ve heard from many people whose six-word creations spurred them to shoot for six hundred, six thousand, or more. Robin Templeton, author of After Harvard, had baby with crackhead, the first story in our first book, is now working on a full-length memoir. In that spirit, we’ve added a feature calledback-story on SMITHmag.net, where you can tell the longer tale behind your mini-memoir. And this book features an appendix, where, for the first time, we’ve included a selection of stories behind the six. (Six-word purists should feel free to skip that part.) Online there are many more backstories, as well as art and videos from contributors all over the world.

    We launched SMITH Magazine to provide a new kind of reading experience, a place where users create the content and editors curate

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