Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure

It’s said that Ernest Hemingway wrote the shortest story ever: For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

In 2006, the storytelling website SMITH Magazine challenged people to do the same with memoir. Now, editors Rachel Fershleiser and Larry Smith have compiled nearly a thousand of the best into this collection.

While some resemble epitaphs (It was worth it, I think - by Annette Laitinen), most, like Hemingway, say enough in six words to evoke a full narrative arc (After Harvard, had baby with crackhead - Robin Templeton).

There are stories of vulnerability:
I was born some assembly required. - Eric Jordan
Quiet guy; please pay closer attention. - Jonathan Lesser
Can my words have footnotes, please? - Amy Harbottle

…and misfit:
Right brain working show more left brain job. - Dave Terry
Type A personality. Type B capability. - Keith Lang
Fact-checker by day, liar by night. - Andy Young

…of humor and joy:
Four children in four decades; whew! - Loretta Serrano
The day just kept getting better. - Jeff Cranmer

…and heat:
Brought it to a boil, often. - Mario Batali
Asked to quiet down; spoke louder. - Wendy Lee
Asked and answered, asshole, next question. - Joe Lockhart

…and cleverness:
Palindromic novels fall apart halfway through. - Chuck Clark
EDITOR. Get it? - Kate Hamill

The compilation is not only entertaining, it’s inspiring. You can’t help but consider your own memoir, even while you mind-write some of these into full-length fiction. show less

Rating: 3.75* of five

My Review: Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a thousand glimpses of humanity—six words at a time.
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 the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way, too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving.

From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience show more in tasty bite-size pieces.

The original edition of Not Quite What I Was Planning spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and thanks to massive media attention—from NPR to the The New Yorker—the six-word memoir concept spread to classrooms, dinner tables, churches, synagogues, and tens of thousands of blogs. This deluxe edition has been revised and expanded to include more than sixty never-before-seen memoirs.

From authors Elizabeth Gilbert, Richard Ford, and Joyce Carol Oates to celebrities Stephen Colbert, Mario Batali, and Joan Rivers to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.

My Review: I think this is the perfect book for, uhmmmm, browsing while you're stuck in Uncle John's sacred space. Sometimes funny, a few placed perfectly to cause loss of consciousness every few pages.

A must-acquire for those facing airplane travel, and an essential distraction source for the "death meetings." show less

Legend has it that author Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in only six words. His telling (and heartbreaking) reply was: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn."
So was born a brand-new genre which Smith Magazine has now explored in the first of several six-word books, "Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-word Memoirs by Authors Famous & Obscure." In addition to contributions by well-known persons such as Stephen Colbert, Joan Rivers, and Joyce Carol Oates, Smith also accepted submissions from hundreds of people you've never heard of via their website, where anyone can post a memoir or twenty, from which most of the book's content (and most of its best) was picked. The memoirs themselves range from the hilarious to the show more tragic to the just plain weird, but are always candid and genuinely human. As the New York Post said of the book, "The brilliance is in the brevity." Each memoir is an ever-so-tiny window into a real person's life, and I often found myself wanting to find these people and just talk to them- gay priests, unpublished authors, regretful immigrants, and stoners all have stories to tell.
My favorite memoir? Page 25. Go read it. show less

What an awesome cross-section of people! This book was addicting -- I just couldn't stop reading all of these little slices of others' lives. Each of the six words is so loaded with meaning that I'll be thinking about what people said for weeks to come.

I'm very excited to have my students write six-word memoirs now too

Not Quite What I Was Planning is a book that rose out of a legend: namely, that Ernest Hemingway had been challenged – and succeeded in – telling a compelling story in only six words. SMITH magazine up the ante by challenging readers to submit six-word memoirs. The editors culled the best of those responses to present in this petit book. The six-word memoirs came in from celebrities and everyday Joes, and they run the gamut from sad to funny, deep to shallow, “right on!” to “Huh?” Below are some of my favorites:

Watching quietly from every door frame.

I hope to outlive my regrets.

My life’s a bunch of almosts.

My reach always exceeds my grasp.

Anything possible-but I was tired.

Young optimist: proven wrong. Prematurely show more old.

Memory was my drug of choice.

Always working on the next chapter.

Started small, grew, peaked, shrunk, vanished. (George Saunders)

If there’s more, I want it.

Well, I thought it was funny. (Stephen Colbert)

Seeking route, not sure of destination.

Became more like myself every year.

Big heart protected by sharp tongue.

I tried. It was not enough.

Naively expected logical world. Acted foolish.

And there’s many more where these came from. With some, there’s an accompanying drawing or photograph sent in by the writer. The book includes an index at the back grouping by topic, which are funnily named (i.e., “religion-losin’ it” and “religion-lovin’ it”).

The only thing I didn’t like about the book was that big-name authors got a whole page for their quote while lesser knowns were all mixed together, generally five to a page. Nevertheless, I found it entertaining enough that I will be checking out the sequel sometime soon. show less

The editors of SMITH Magazine, an online "vibrant community of storytellers", invited its readers to contribute six-word memoirs, and roughly a thousand were selected for this book. Some authors are famous, most are not. Many of the memoirs are pedestrian ("Will draw for food and coffee"), but a small handful were thought provoking. A couple of my favorites:

"Explained Hitler, Shakespeare. Couldn't explain self."
"I died at an early age."
"I hear nothing and see everyone."

I found it mildly interesting, and it was probably the fastest book I've ever read. This would make a nice Christmas present or birthday gift for certain people, so I would recommend it for that reason.

A fun little book that manages to capture the heart of a person in six words. A few of these are amazing... others, not quite so much. Many of these will leave you in tears... quite amazing what kind of a story 6 words make.