From the Nieman Conference--quick hit on memoir

Andrew Lam, a writer and a commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, spoke about writing memoir. A Vietnamese American whose father was an army general and who left Vietnam during the fall of Saigon in 1975, said he wrote it because it was a way for him to carve out a space for himself and not be invisible in America.

During a conversation on writing about family and dealing with the inevitable fallout, Lam summed up the issue with this cautionary statement: "If there's a writer born into a family, then that family is totally screwed."