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    Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak: by Writers Famous and Obscure
    Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak: by Writers Famous and Obscure
    Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak: by Writers Famous and Obscure
    Ebook121 pages31 minutes

    Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak: by Writers Famous and Obscure

    By Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser

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    About this ebook

    “A perfect distraction and inspiration, and a collection that begs to be shared.”  — Denver Post

    Love wounds the heart and soul . . .

    From the editors of the New York Times bestseller Not Quite What I Was Planning comes another collection of terse true tales—this time simple sagas exploring the complexities of the human heart. Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak contains hundreds of personal stories about the pinnacles and pitfalls of romance. Brilliant in their brevity, these insightful slivers of passion, pain, and connection capture every shade of love and loss—six words at a time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 6, 2009
    ISBN9780061977138
    Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak: by Writers Famous and 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 Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak

    4/5

    55 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Happy. Sad. Funny. Between two covers.
    • 4/5
      Pros:-Laughter-Feels-Quick, Light ReadMisc. Notes:-Heartache-variation in font type, size, and color-no themed sections for memoirsContent Warning:suicide, incest, rape, lying, cheating, depression, heartbreakSome Notable Lines:"What once were two, are one.""Wonder-filled, and never a dull torment.""No closet could hide this love.""I fixed him but broke myself."
    • 5/5
      Fresh break up; wine and netflix.

      He was a jerk, and I was stupid.

      That's how I'm going through my post-break up.

      This is the type of quick comfort reads that I needed at 3am, so that I know my experience is not as good or bad as some others.

      Feel better now.

    • 5/5
      awesome *_*
    • 4/5
      Can one say it all in just six words? It's possible. Some of the most intriguing in this themed collection: Concern with freedom became his bondage. I put the seat down now. Love: eight pounds and six ounces.
    • 5/5
      I adore six-word memoirs, so perhaps this review will be a little biased :) Ever since reading Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, I fell in love with the six-word short-short genre. Ostensibly inspired by Hemingway's "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn," the genre has really taken off since SMITH Magazine has taken it under its wing. Now one can read six-word memoirs all day long through the website feeds, and one can even submit too! I wrote six-word memoirs with a class I taught two years ago, and middle schoolers loved it too!I cannot say enough good about six-word memoirs, and this book did not disappoint. It whetted my appetite for all of the six-word memoir books that have been published by SMITH.Focused on love and the disintegration or celebration thereof, this book brought a lot of different perspectives to that ubiquitous love that we are constantly bombarded with from all angles. It spoke of divorce, children, homosexuality, heterosexuality, heartbroken-ness, passion, anger, and happiness. The whole range of feelings that deal with love were here in this easy-to-read book. Though I read it in one sitting, I'm sure I will dip back into the book time and time again, as I have with Not Quite What I Was Planning, to get some writing inspiration and see things from a new perspective.That's really what the six-word genre does - it brings a new perspective to its topic and gives the reader something to think about long after the last page is closed. That's what I love about it, and that's why I give all six-word memoir collections a glowing recommendation. Thank heavens I got this one for about $3!
    • 3/5
      I find books like this interesting, in the sense that I'd prefer to pick them up at random and flick through them now and again. I like brevity in things I'm reading: it gives my imagination more to do. So in that sense, very interesting.

      Some of these are heartbreaking, some make me smile, and some are just infuriating.
    • 4/5
      A fun read. Unfortunately, I was able to identify with some of the six-word memoirs.
    • 5/5
      I realy liked this book because its so realtebale and its bout love and heart break wich everybody goes trhough sooner or later
    • 5/5
      Here's mine: I just wanted to read, OK?
    • 4/5
      This book would have been a favorite had I read it at nineteen instead of fifty-two; love and romance just doesn’t have the zing it once did for me. I can’t seem to get the pain of heartbreak any more. Is it my age? I found the first book, little six-word tales of a life, much more clever.
    • 5/5
      See that byline? "Writers Famous and Obscure." I'm one of the obscure ones. My one line of glory is on page 125: The couch is actually quite comfortable. I have a contributor's copy on the way, but I couldn't resist going ahead and buying the book when I saw in on the Valentine's display table at B&N.That said, this is a very quick and interesting read. I have a preference for the six-word memoirs that are a full sentence ("The apartment is much cleaner now") compared to the ones that read more like a snappy newspaper headline. The curious thing about these "memoirs" is that they are like a teaser into someone's life. What happened? What does that really mean? What happened then?A few of my favorites:She knows what my Kryptonite is.It's lonely here on the shelf.But his sweat tasted like mushrooms.My marital advice? Marry an orphan.I could go on and on. There is a good mix of positive and negative here, just like life. It's an intriguing concept for a book, and I hope they publish more of them. If anyone is curious about submitting their own memoirs to the project, go to their web site. And take a look at the book, too. It's short enough that a person can probably read it while standing in the book store, but some of these little sentences are bound to haunt you.

    Book preview

    Six-Word Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak - Larry Smith

    Introduction

    We launched SMITH Magazine (www.SMITHmag.net) in 2006 because we’ve always believed in the power of storytelling. Collecting six-word memoirs, as we’ve been doing for more than two years now, has taught us even more than we imagined. When Ernest Hemingway famously wrote For Sale: baby shoes, never worn, he proved that an entire story can be told using a half dozen words. When we first asked readers to submit six-word memoirs back in December 2006, we realized a whole, real life can be conveyed this way, too. We’ve learned about honesty and bravery and good writing, often from people who hadn’t considered themselves writers. We’ve witnessed how generous people can be in sharing their stories, and how much it means to them to be asked.

    People around the world told us of happiness and pain (Found true love, married someone else), success and failure (Never really finished anything, except cake), and how rarely the path we start on is the one we take to the completion of a journey (After Harvard, had baby with crackhead). Perhaps contributor Summer Grimes really did say it best—for most of us, life is not quite what I was planning. We used her memoir as the title of our first book, and it was a hit, even making the New York Times bestseller list—for six weeks, as luck would have it.

    The most exciting thing about the success of Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure

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