Books by Patti Miller

Writing Your Life
If you have dreamed by childhood creeks, played in a dusty schoolyard, watched the sun rise after a partner has died, or lived through any of life’s twists and turns, then you have a life story to write. Writing Your Life shows you how.

This book is also about the psychological and spiritual journey of the writing the self. The journey is one of discovery and this book is a map of the terrain. Writing Your Life gives you the skills you will need to undertake that journey. In writing your life you reveal and create its meaning.

This best-selling edition of Writing Your Life provides techniques for getting started, finding your writing voice, accessing memory and discovering the structure of your story. It also explores the wider area of life writing: sojourn and travel writing, ‘recovery’ writing and memoir. It discusses issues such as selective memory, emotional pain and growth, objections from family members, how to communicate you philosophic and spiritual truths without cliche and the challenges of sorting through the raw material of your own life.

Writing Your Life: a journey of discovery
Allen & Unwin Sydney 2001 $24.95

Child
Corrie and Michael's twenty-year-old son, Tom, goes to Asia after dropping out of university - no-one hears from him and he does not return on the due date. His parents are left to contemplate the nightmarish possibilities. Corrie, haunted by her own unremembered past, waits, while Michael travels through Asia looking for their son. 


A beautiful novel about family secrets and loss  and our deepest hopes and fears.

Child, Allen and Unwin, 
Out of print. Available only online.
Try www.booksandcollectibles.com.au

The Last One Who Remembers
Creating stories from her own experience, Patti Miller tells real and fictional narratives about her great-aunts, weaving imaginary tales about actual lives, and exploring the possibilities in the silence under the stream of stories. 

The Last One Who Remembers traverses the boundaries of fiction, personal history and essay. Miller explores the stories which shape our lives; shifting from the overhead murmurings of family, through tales of childhood landscape and religion, to fantasies of sex and the illusory certainties of intellectual knowledge. She looks at how these stories create our sense of self and form our picture of the world. 

The Last One Who Remembers, Allen and Unwin
Out of print. Available only online.
Try www.booksandcollectibles.com.au

Whatever the Gods Do
After spending the past seven years being the "second mother" of ten-year-old Theo, life-writing teacher Patti Miller is devastated when he and his father move away. Desperately missing Theo and needing to distract herself, she decides to take singing lessons, something she has always longed to do, despite misgivings about her voice. But, if anything, the lessons make her fee worse - she can't even get the notes out, let alone sing them in tune.

While recounting the saga of her singing lessons, Patti - who for many years has helped other people write their experiences - also tells the story of her life with Theo: her friendship with his parents, Kit and Dina: the fateful day Dina's life changed irretrievably: and the agonising months that followed. In charting this instantaneous transformation of Dina's life, as well as the slow unfolding of her own connection to Theo, the subterranean shifts of her body's rhythms, and her painstaking efforts to sing, Patti reveals the trials and ultimate triumph in discovering how one's own voice can transcend the everyday.

Resonating throughout with hope and love of life, Whatever the Gods Do is a passionate and lyrical account of friendship and loss, of singing and storytelling, and of the universal quest to express one's own experience of being.

Whatever the Gods Do, Random House
Out of print. Patti Miller has some available. $20 plus postage. Or try www.booksandcollectibles.com.au

The Memoir Book
Memoir - writing about an aspect of a life rather than a whole life - expresses and shapes these stories within us so that the writing becomes more than a record, it becomes a creative journey.

Drawing on Patti's extensive teaching and writing experience, and using examples and exercises, The Memoir Book provides invaluable insight on how to find your topic, develop narrative voice, find a balance between factual truth and vivid story-telling, explore creative ways of structuring memories, and helps identify the best form for your writing – whether it be literary memoir, narrative non-fiction, sojourn and travel writing, or even the personal essay.

Written in Patti's warm, clear and conversational style, this book is an essential guide for anyone who wants to write memoir or extend the possibilities of autobiography and non-fiction. The Memoir Book, a companion volume to her highly successful guide Writing Your Life, provides inspiration and practical advice for both new and experienced writers exploring the popular genre of memoir.

Allen & Unwin Upcoming May 2007
$24.95

To buy The Memoir Book

Life Stories Workshop
PO Box 603 Potts Point NSW 2011 |  Phone 02 9332 2787  |  Email: pmiller@lifestories.com.au.
ABN 17 929 410 340