Oscar Hijuelos

When you're writing a novel -- at least the way I write is I work from what I would call emotional atmosphere, ambiance to ambiance.

So, I work towards leaving the reader with a sense of certain emotions. With a memoir, you want to do both. You want to leave the reader with a strong sense of an emotional world, but you also have to be more fact-reliant, and also you have to prioritize about those events in your life, and you have to pass judgment.

You have to just say, how important this was to that time? And, hopefully, you can take an incident and attach all kinds of emotions and insights about the period, your family, and so forth to an event.

-Oscar Hijuelos

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