Experience Singapore Literature

How to write a Memoir
Saturday, 28 November, 2.00 – 4.00 pm
Visitors’ Briefing Room, Level 1, National Library Building

What’s it about a 92-year-old Hakka woman that compelled her son to write her life story, especially her last two years of being enfeebled in body and emptied in brain? A victim of the disease of slow dying and slow living, the mother surprised both son and Alzheimer’s by turning tragedy into triumph.

Hear from Chai Kee on how the memoir of an uneducated matriarch’s roller-coasting life from pre-WWII into the new millennium evolves into an accidental manual on how to face and fight adversity in his book ‘Even When She Forgot My Name’.

The talk walks through the four-year writing journey of a first-time author – of how the difficulty in getting out the first 1,000 words became the challenge of cutting out three-fifths of the first draft of 140,000 words, of how friends and editors helped to keep the writing going and on track, and of how the author combined his seasoned sensitivity as a psychotherapist with his developing craft of writing a full-length book.

Due to limited places for each session, please register! Registration can be made at http://golibrary.nlb.gov.sg, ‘Experience Singapore Literature.’

The Author

A Melbourne University-trained psychologist, Wong Chai Kee has  run his own management consultancy firm, with a 190-strong client list of multinational, government-linked and mainboard-listed companies, for twenty-two years. He loves writing, and has written numerous articles on psychology and on Christianity. A voracious reader, especially of memoirs and history, he has an insatiable urge to buy books, despite reading at least a page of every book bought.