Let It Bleed

How to Write a Rockin' Memoir

Author of the international bestseller I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie, Pamela Des Barres shares with women the art of memoir writing.

For the last fourteen years, Pamela Des Barres has been teaching an eight-week women's "femoir" writing workshop. She found that the music-loving ladies who showed up at her door had pent-up stories to tell. Many of them had read her two memoirs, which were wildly personal and deeply confessional, and felt comfortable opening up and experiencing that same freedom of expression.
     In this book, Des Barres guides women through the process of writing their memoirs. She has developed exercises to help her "dolls" recall, remember, relive, and reveal their memories, transgressions, temptations, their sleepless nights and brilliant afternoons, loves and losses, fears and regrets, secrets, sins, and sorrows. The assignments in Femoir have proven incredibly cathartic for her students. Just as intimate as one of her in-person workshops, this book includes some of Des Barres's own stories, as well as those of the women she's taught.
     Every person has an incredible story to tell—they just need to figure out how to tell it. By understanding themselves better through these writing exercises, women learn to be more fearless, free-spirited, and willing to try something new.