How to write a brutally honest memoir (without pissing everyone off)
How to write a brutally honest memoir (without pissing everyone off)
Award-winning magazine Editor Terri White talks through the process of writing and publishing her first book - a memoir, Coming Undone, out July 2nd with Canongate. She'll discuss the writing process - from language choices and narrative structure, to the tone and texture of storytelling. Plus, the professional and personal concerns and considerations she navigated when writing about her childhood of poverty and abuse and the subsequent mental health crisis she suffered while editing Time Out New York in the US. What are the moral and ethical questions of telling your story when life and memory inevitably involves other people? Join Terri at XpoNorth as she discusses the tricky art of writing a truly honest, unflinching memoir.
Speaker: Terri White
Chair: Peter Urpeth
Chair
Peter Urpeth
Writing and Publishing Sector Specialist, XpoNorth
Peter Urpeth is XpoNorth’s publishing sector specialist, with nearly twenty years of experience in developing and delivering development programmes for creative business in the Highlands and Islands. He has more than 35 years experience as an editor working in the newspaper and magazine industry and is now focussed on multi-media story-telling, and is a published novelist and poet. As a pianist, Peter has for many years worked in free improvisation and in composition and performance for silent movies. He used to worry about this polymathic mix, but not now. Peterurpeth.com
Speakers
Terri White
Editor-in-Chief, Empire magazine
Terri White is Editor-in-Chief of Empire magazine, having previously edited some of the most read titles in the UK and US, including Time Out New York and Shortlist, where she was named Men’s Magazine Editor of the Year. She has also written for the Guardian and the Pool. Her memoir ‘Coming Undone’ is due for release in July 2020 published by Canongate -to everyone else, Terri White appeared to be living the dream, named one of Folio’s Top Women in US Media and accruing further awards for the magazines she was editing. In reality, she was rapidly skidding towards a mental health crisis that would land her in a locked psychiatric ward as her past caught up with her. As well as growing up in a household in poverty, Terri endured sexual and physical abuse at the hands of a number of her mother’s partners. Her success defied all expectations, but the greater the disparity between her outer achievements and inner demons, the more she struggled to hold everything together. Coming Undone is Terri’s documentation of her unravelling, and her precarious navigation back from a life in pieces.
