Writing a memoir is a very personal thing. You peer into your past and decide what secrets you want to reveal to strangers. Likewise, writing a biography looks into another’s past, curating what important things you want to reveal about your subject. In the case of Pismo Beach author Raymond McDonald, he’s done both with Merle Haggard Was a Friend of Mine, which reveals McDonald’s early years as well as where his life overlapped and intersected with Haggard’s.
