The Art of Memoir: Memory, Invention, and the Self

Join Clio’s for an evening of literary excavation as we explore the alchemy of memory, truth, and imagination in memoir. Anthropologist Cari Borja will be in conversation with memoirists Tristine Rainer, author of Apprenticed to Venus and Your Life as Story, and L. John Harris, author of Portrait in Red, My Little Plague Journal, and Cafe French: A Flaneur's Guide to the Language, Lore and Food of the Paris Cafe. Together, they will discuss the craft and compulsion of turning life into literature: how memory becomes story, how art shapes identity, and how writing the self becomes an act of both revelation and creation. Rainer and Harris will explore what it means to shape the chaos of experience into form, to find coherence in contradiction, and to reveal the secret architecture between body, memory, and art.

Tristine Rainer is a pioneer in the fields of journal writing, memoir, and women-focused television movies. In 1978 she published The New Diary, which envisioned journal writing evolving into the dynamic field of study it has become. Almost five decades later it remains the definitive and seminal work, used by psychologists, occupational therapists and diarists around the world. In 1997 Rainer published Your Life as Story: Discovering the New Autobiography and Writing Memoir as Literature. The book shares the secrets of story structure and narrative craft for memoir writers. In 2017 she published her own autobiographic novel about her relationship with the famed diarist Anais Nin, Apprenticed to Venus, circling back to where her passion for diary writing began.

L. John Harris, born in Los Angeles, studied art and literature at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. He launched his cookbook company, Aris Books, in 1980 and his “Foodoodles” cartoon byline in Bay Area magazines led to a series of illustrated memoirs: Foodoodles (2010), Café French (2019), My Little Plague Journal (2022), and Portrait in Red (2024). Mr. Harris co-produced with PBS in 2001 the film Los Romeros: The Royal Family of the Guitar and serves as the curator of the Harris Guitar Collection at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Harris is currently working on a history of Berkeley’s “gourmet ghetto.”