Bad Boy By William Zinsser Analysis

In the memoir’’ How to write a memoir’’, written by William Zinsser, Zinsser goes into specific detail for beginner memoir writers on how do you write a memoir. He encourages each of them to ‘’ Be themselves’’,’’ Tell their own story and they should write about what they want’’, and ‘’ Think small, don’t over think what you are writing about.’’(Zinsser’s memoir pages 2,4,6) This advice tells beginner memoir writer to express who you are and say as much as you would like to say. In the memoir ‘’ Bad Boy’’, Walter Dean Myers gives a lot of insight on what his childhood was like.

In Walter Dean Myers’s memoir, he explains about him and his family’s lifestyle when he was a kid. In the memoir ‘’ Bad Boy’’, Myers recalls his home city, Harlem as

Zinsser said that if they get offended in any sort of way that they could write a memoir them self. In a ways Myers describes his mother a strict woman who is family orientated. In’’ Harlem’’ Myers asks his mother for a nickel so he could get an icy pop from the corner store. He asks again and once again she says No. He threatened that if she didn’t give him a nickel that he would break his sister, Gerry’s watch. She told him to go in the living room and play. So he went along with the plan of breaking his watch. First he tried to break it with his shoe, but it didn’t work. So he combined his and his father’s shoes to make more of an impact and hit the watch as hard as he could until he could see a crack. He went go show his mom very proud of the work that he had done. Now here is the part that his mother probably had gotten really offended about. His mom was so angry at him that she spanked him . His mother probably didn’t want him to state that in his memoir, but hey just as William Zinsser said, they could write their own memoir about their life and