How Illustrations and Photos Inform and Enhance Memoir

Memoir Nation

This week Grant and Brooke consider images as enhancements to memoir. Historically publishers have tended to regard images in memoir with reservation, but that’s been changing in recent years. Guest Jennifer Croft’s recent memoir, Homesick, is accompanied by her own Polaroids. When should photos be included, or central? And what are some other memoirs that have been improved by the addition of images? Whether to include images involves many considerations—from your reader, to style, to the interplay between words and image, and Jennifer Croft offers thoughtful insights around this and more.

Jennifer Croft is the author of the illustrated memoir, Homesick, and the translator of Polish of Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, for which she won the 2018 International Booker Prize. She won a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship for her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, the 2020 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing for Homesick. She is a founding editor of The Buenos Aires Review and has published her own work and numerous translations in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Granta, VICE, n+1, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, BOMB, and many more.

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