Throughout the book, he never leaves a chance to discuss his insecurities and his phobias. Lines like above are the ones which makes them human, the great legends were just like us, normal human beings, they made their way to greatness. Learning anything is valuable, but I was only eight years old and hadn’t quite got that into my head.” Throughout the book, he expresses his love for his name and wouldn’t let it alter at any cost. I presume my father’s defense was that he wanted me to learn English and make it my first language, untroubled by the complexities of another, so that I could become a complete American.”Īsimov is a Russian name, and his family migrated from Russia to America when he was a baby.

More importantly, how they started, how they felt and their own retrospective justification on how things turn out in the end. They justify their choices, give their rationale at that point in time and try to add a funny angle to it when they look back. Memoir comes under non fiction, but I find them more interesting because they are real life stories and they themselves are describing their lives from retrospective and introspective view points.

My love for memoir began last year when I read Stephen King’s memoir On Writing.Īsimov has already defined memoir above, to put more simply - it is a collection of memories with no particular order or pattern. (Not to mention that Amazon’s promotional mail led me to buying this ebook on kindle). I would like that.”ĭespite the fact that I haven’t read any of the science fiction written by Asimov, I started reading this book because of recently developed interest in the memoir genre. I trust and hope that, in this way, you will get to know me really well, and, who knows, you may even get to like me. What I intend to do is to break the book into numerous sections, each dealing with some different phase of my life or some different person who affected me, and follow it as far as necessary - to the very present, if need be. I won’t go into the kind of detail I went into in the first two volumes. “So what I intend to do is describe my whole life as a way of presenting my thoughts and make it an independent autobiography standing on its own feet.

I asimov a memoir