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Introduction
     
    We launched SMITH Magazine (www.SMITHmag.net) in 2006 because we’ve always believed in the power of storytelling. Collecting six-word memoirs, as we’ve been doing for more than two years now, has taught us even more than we imagined. When Ernest Hemingway famously wrote “For Sale: baby shoes, never worn,” he proved that an entire story can be told using a half dozen words. When we first asked readers to submit six-word memoirs back in December 2006, we realized a whole, real life can be conveyed this way, too. We’ve learned about honesty and bravery and good writing, often from people who hadn’t considered themselves “writers.” We’ve witnessed how generous people can be in sharing their stories, and how much it means to them to be asked.
    People around the world told us of happiness and pain (“Found true love, married someone else”), success and failure (“Never really finished anything, except cake”), and how rarely the path we start on is the one we take to the completion of a journey (“After Harvard, had baby with crackhead”). Perhaps contributor Summer Grimes really did say it best—for most of us, life is “not quite what I was planning.” We used her memoir as the title of our first book, and it was a hit, even making the New York Times bestseller list—for six weeks, as luck would have it.
    The most exciting thing about the success of Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure has been watching other people re-imagine the form. From kindergarten through graduate school, teachers brought the six-word storytelling exercise into their classrooms. A reverend in North Carolina preached six-word prayers to his congregation, and a young girl in California ended her eulogy for her poker-loving grandma with a six-word summation of her life (“Look, I have a royal flush!”). An exercise instructor used these mini-memoirs to keep his cycling students pumping, and an Alzheimer’s sufferer turned to our stories when longer ones proved too challenging to remember. A composer decided to begin a six-word song cycle, and after a blogger challenged her readers to write a six-word memoir and then “tag” five friends, a six-word memoir “meme” began racing across hundreds of thousands of personal blogs all over the world. It continues to grow as we write these words.
    Six-word memoirs still pour into SMITH every day. As we’ve sifted through piles of briefly encapsulated lives, we’ve seen themes emerge, from faith to hair to masturbation to French fries. By far the most common thread, however, is love. Passionate love, parental love, platonic love—it seemed to be the most universally life-changing factor for storytellers of every age, background, and worldview.
    This book celebrates life in all its shades of red—a valentine, if you will, to every kind of love. But it’s also a nod to love’s evil twin: heartache. So many of our favorite memoirs, from “Ex-wife and contractor now have house” to “Girlfriend is pregnant, my husband said,” reflect the other side of Cupid’s coin—the breakups and losses that make the hard-won magical moments that much more powerful.
    We’ve once again brought you a book that’s a grab bag of the famous and unknown. Both types of memoirist are inspiring, and often it won’t matter which you’re reading. You don’t have to be a fashionista to feel each and every one of designer Marc Ecko’s six words: “It never hurt as good again.” If you’ve read Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Eat, Pray, Love , then her six words, “My life’s accomplishments? Sanity, and you,” carry extra-special meaning. If you haven’t, you still appreciate the sentiment.
    The oft-quoted Tolstoy line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” seems to hold true for relationships as well. It was frequently the six-word stories of complications or even misery that we found most