“IT WAS my mother that started me writing seriously, when I was 12, after her death. I wrote to keep a line of communication open to her…”

What is the difference between a memoir and an autobiography?

Well, an autobiography can be described as a record of accomplishment, an account of an interesting life, but a memoir should be intensely readable and interesting in itself, with added intimacy through the sharing of personal experience.

A good autobiography is fascinating, a good memoir is gripping.

So if we all have a book inside us, and for many of us it would be an autobiography or memoir, what is it that drives some of us to put pen to paper. Rick Vick, one of the impending Stroud Book Festival directors sums it up in the following way: “We’ve all got a jungle inside us, it simply needs exploring and we can do that if we unlock our word hoard and let our pencils, pens or fingers on the steam of a window free to release all those scary and exciting mysteries”

Which bring me rather neatly back to the opening quote from Adam Horovitz, shown here in it’s entirety: “It was my mother that started me writing seriously, when I was 12, after her death. I wrote to keep a line of communication open to her.

"It took me a long time to work beyond the cathartic stage of this, to edge into something a little more universal. I'm wary of the idea of art as catharsis, or therapy.

"A poem may be personal, it may be emotionally autobiographical, but if it doesn't try and reach far beyond that, it is failing as art…”

Adam will be in conversation with Rick Vick during the Book Festival for his event, “Inheriting the Mantle: Writing in the Cotswolds”.

Perhaps people who haven’t read Adam’s book “A Thousand Laurie Lees”, won’t have realised that the book is in fact Adam’s story and not Laurie Lee’s.

The quote above, which he kindly proved for this article (“say something salacious or painfully personal” I said, and then instantly wished I hadn’t) reminded me just how painfully personal a writer’s work can be.

I know Rick and Adam will be touching on grief and the personal nature of writing during their discussion, and I can’t help but admire both of them their courage in doing so.

I wonder if it can be argued that all writing is personal and sharing your thoughts and creative impulses part of some hidden drive? It certainly seems the case for Andrew Ward, who has authored and co-authored almost 30 sports books.

He will be appearing alongside Alice Jolly on the Tuesday of the Festival to discuss his book “The Birth Fathers Tale” with Jackie Kabler. The book tells Andrew’s personal experience of how losing a child to the adoption process impacted on his career choices, relationships and attitudes and explains why he became a specialist in follow-up stories, life-stories and narrative, working for a times as a university careers counsellor.

I felt incredibly privileged to read both Andrew and Alice’s stories, Alice’s savagely personal, humorous account of her battles with miscarriage, IVF and failed adoption attempts in her beautiful book “Dead babies and Seaside Towns” is so beautifully and powerfully written that I sat on a plane and wept as I read it.

As the Financial Times put it: "The miracle is that this powerfully written book is not only bearable but compulsively readable.

"It should be grim but it is absolutely not. Jolly's resolute determination to tell the whole, exhausting truth, however searing, emotional, unfashionable, unpalatable or savagely humorous, keeps is turning the pages, well into the night, and cheering her on.”

Now surely that is the perfect description of a memoir?

And what of film editor and director Pip Heywood, what was his drive to recount his past? Pip’s autobiography “The Eye of the Hare” grew out of 35 years as a documentary film editor, he felt that “having told other people's stories for decades, with respect for contributors going in front of the camera to tell often deep and heartfelt stuff, it seemed right that I should put myself - not in front of a lens, but into a book.”

But Pip’s book, which took 8 years to complete, is multilayered, it reflects a daily conversation with himself, how he constantly cross-references different parts of his life, past and present.

He writes as he would film-edit, intercutting between scenes, introduces other elements as a juxtaposition.

Pip further clarifies; “It may seem odd, at a book festival, to suggest that we move through and beyond the words, but that'll be my theme.

I began to write the book when I snapped my Achilles tendon and couldn't move about. I was 56, and began, through the writing, to have a conversation with myself as a man and as a little boy.

At the age of two, I severely burnt both my hands on an electric fire, and was then in and out of hospital until I was 10, undergoing orthopaedic surgery. It made me develop my own kind of dexterity.”

It seems to me that in order to write a good memoir you need all of the talent and technique of a writer of fiction, but you need something else too, you need to become vulnerable.

And what a privilege we have at this year’s festival to share these author’s stories.

Stroud Book Festival takes place between the 11-20th November, tickets can be purchased online via www.subscriptionrooms.org.uk or by calling 01453 756900.