Editor’s note: Our Monday writer, Juliet, is unavailable today, both literarily and emotionally. She agreed to post this piece by guest contributor Howard Freeman via non-committal text message that left enough ambiguity to interpret her intentions in a variety of ways. This essay was written in 2011. You can read the original here.

Though I worked until nearly midnight last night and was dog tired, having got three hours of sleep the night before, I tossed for most of my six hours in the sack, trying not to wake my wife and thinking about that blasted NPR story on the “six-word memoir” that one of my Facebook friends posted.

I had clicked unwittingly on the link yesterday morning and, like a Koobface virus, the item quickly took hold of my greying brain coils and replicated itself within my consciousness, so that between about 3:00 and 5:50 this morning I could think only of that and whether my 45-year-old prostate was squeezing my bladder enough to warrant a trip out from the warm covers and over to the bathroom.  The allure to a writer – of the memoir thingy, not the bladder deal – is how to capture a life in so few words.  Legend has it Hemingway was asked to write a complete story in six words.  He penned, “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  The challenge in this case, the article said, is to write a memoir, not a fortune cookie. Continue reading →