March 12, 2008

Now That's What You Call the "Reader's Digest" Version

Lizzie Widdicombe ’06 chronicles her attendance at a book party for Not Quite What I Was Planning, a compilation of six-word memoirs...

In a recent New Yorker piece, Lizzie Widdicombe ’06 chronicles her attendance at a book party for Not Quite What I Was Planning, a compilation of six-word memoirs. That's right—these are people's attempts to condense their life stories into six words. Some examples: "Fix a toilet, get paid crap," from a plumber; "Yes, you can edit this biography," from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.)

Widdicombe, a former Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at Harvard Magazine, offers her own hilarious suggestions for those the book didn't include. For Hillary Clinton: "From Ill.; met Bill; iron will."

And Widdicombe has the courage to craft her own piece entirely from six-word sentences: "The book party: Housing Works, downtown. Cookies and beer on a table." She doesn't even cheat—she counts hyphenated words as two, not one. ("The magazine was flooded with entries. Five hundred-plus submissions per day.")

Read the piece here: Say It All in Six Words.

You might also like

Portrait of a man in a denim shirt beside a blue book cover for "Gretal and the Great War" featuring an illustration of a leg holding an army helmet..

How Adam Ehrlich Sachs Writes Absurd and Beautiful Fiction

The Gretel and the Great War author on how the Lampoon derailed his science career—and set him on a literary path.

Caricature of a young man in front of red doors, wearing a green striped sweater.

The Year a Beat Poet Squatted at Harvard

In 1954, Gregory Corso moved into Eliot House. How he stayed there is a literary legend.

Book cover featuring vibrant underwater plants and coral with the title "Under Water" by Tara Menon.

Tara Menon’s Debut Novel Combines Friendship, Grief, and Climate Disaster

The popular Harvard English professor published Under Water this spring.

Most popular

Bronze statue of a seated figure holding a book, with a campus setting in the background.

Explore More From Current Issue

A woman jogs on a path beside a boy riding a bicycle, surrounded by trees.

Health & Medicine

Why Harvard Medical School is training physicians to think more like coaches

Collage of three photos of an athlete in a triathlon: one swimming, one cycling, one running, in sports attire.

Alumni Profiles

The Harvard triathlete and coach says she helps normal people to “do extraordinary things.”

Ancient Egyptian painted sarcophagus with detailed hieroglyphs and a woman's face.

Museums & Collections

A rare Egyptian mummy case is on display at the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East.