Can you tell your life story in six words?
In our new world of 140-character breaking news and micro-sized Facebook updates, we’ve trained ourselves to think in brief bursts. But we haven’t necessarily dumbed ourselves down.
Smith Magazine‘s Six-Word Memoir Project has tried to hold up the intellectual end of this brevity craze. They’ve enlisted literary heavyweights, culture bloggers, and Hollywood stars to offer up their own miniature autobiographies. (The most famous six-word story, though not an autobiography, is probably Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes. Never worn.”)
Now, Smith, together with the cultural mavens Reboot, is collecting six-word Jewish memoirs. There are the expected cynical voices (“Grandma says: Go blond, get men” by a writer nicknamed “Shoshi”) and the subtly-winking-at-the-reader (“But you just don’t look Jewish,” contributed by Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel). But there are also unexpectedly touching ones: “Taught children, now they teach me” writes RonO.
You can contribute your own at the website until December 25–or wait until March, when the Jewish Six-Word Memoir book will be released.
