What happened was this: I packed every last inch of my earthly belongings into a U-Haul, which my now-fiancee and then-boyfriend was to drive halfway down the east coast. I was going to follow behind in my own car, with two appropriately sedated cats, all the way from Somewhere, New York, down to Nowhere, North Carolina...

We've all told personal stories, verbally, all our lives. This memoir how to will teach you how to write a story with all the story elements needed to take your reader on a journey. That's what good writing does -- your reader experiences your story right along with you as they read.

I love reading Annie Proulx's novels, but this memoir, not so much. Bird Cloud. It's the name of the book and the ranch she built. First she bought some land in Wyoming. The day she first saw the land, there was a cloud in the sky shaped like a bird. The book details her travails of building her "dream house" on the land, a section south of I-80 in Wyoming. This memoir was interesting, in some places interesting like reading an instruction manual is interesting--you know you're learning something as you go but how long will you retain it or care to remember it? Some of it not that long for me.