Normally I work with individual memoir clients: people, usually in their eighties or nineties, who want my help in preserving the story of their life, for distribution to their children, grandchildren and future generations.

Yesterday I celebrated the launch of a different kind of project: a community memoir, exploring the ways that individuals in my hometown of Carlisle, Massachusetts experienced the first eighteen months of the COVID pandemic.

Entitled “Sorrows & Silver Linings: Global Pandemic in a Small Town,” the project began last August, when my friend Christine reached out to me with her idea that there needed to be a way to preserve as a historical record the experiences that townspeople have had during the peak of the COVID pandemic. I’m a journalist and memoir writer; I know how to interview people and capture their stories. Christine, by contrast, is a master of community organizing and project management. She knows how to draw people into an effort and make it all run smoothly. We realized that by combining our skills, this was something we could do.

We put out the word through numerous communications channels asking people to share their stories about the pandemic. These channels included local Facebook groups; our own personal Facebook pages; a townwide listserv; our town’s Recreation Commission, Council on Aging, library, three churches, and public schools; and word of mouth. To our surprise and delight, we quickly had 84 responses, from people ranging in age from 8 to 82. We had young parents and senior citizens; elementary, middle and high school students; Select Board members and teachers; EMTs and nurses and doctors; Boy Scouts and ministers; artists and athletes. Over the course of eight weeks in September and October, each participant met with me for an interview lasting about twenty minutes. Nearly all of them were in person; a few were virtual. The stories they shared were a remarkable reflection of what life has been like during this pandemic.

Some people created things. Barbara sewed masks. Jacob, who is 13, learned to make dinner. Theresa painted rocks and left them on local trails for walkers to find.

Some people suffered losses. Karen lost her father. Nazma lost her mother. Gwen lost an older sister. Caroline lost her children’s father.

And some people got COVID: Lillian, Cory, Teydin’s children, Jimmy’s dad.

Good things happened too. Cameron went running every day. Melinda’s daughter got married. Will moved to a beach house in South Carolina with nine new friends. Susie and Nick had a baby. Lots of dogs and cats moved to town.

People made great achievements. Deborah became a firefighter. Deedy graduated from college and started her dream job in New York City. Stephanie worked hard and trained hard, and now has both a triathlon medal and a big professional advancement to show for it.

Happy and sad, upbeat and poignant, optimistic and anxious, all of these stories paint a picture of what life was like in Carlisle when COVID struck in spring of 2020.

Last week, my collaborator and I attended a School Committee meeting so that we could present a copy of our book to the school library. The School Committee chair said something interesting. “I’m so happy it’s a book,” he said when we handed our book to him. “Not a website; not a blog; not a video series. A real book.” That meant a lot to me, as a writer. It was an important and appreciated reminder that books are still often our most precious historical records.

When we held our launch, to which the whole town was invited, we made nametags for every participant in our project. Above each name was printed the word “storyteller.” During the four months we worked on this project, I usually used the word “participant” when I referred to the many people of all ages who had signed up for interviews. But when it came time for all of us to gather together for the book launch, I thought anew about the 84 individuals who had mustered the courage and humility to share their stories and realized that’s what they were: storytellers, observing that most primal human instinct to share what had happened to them.
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My collaborator and I feel humbled and honored that so many people were willing to let us narrate their experiences. It was a joy for us to unveil our book and share it with our small community – and with the world beyond. 

Want to know more? Click here for a peek at "Sorrows and Silver Linings: Global Pandemic in a Small Town." 

Whether you are writing your memoir, working with a memoir consultant to get it written, or still just thinking about it, there’s one concrete step you can take that is certain to get you a little bit closer to your goal – or, in fact, to any goal. Keep a journal. Write in it every day, if possible.

For years, I’ve been expounding on the many advantages of maintaining a daily writing habit. It’s something I do myself, and it’s something I ceaselessly encourage the participants in the writing groups I lead to do as well.

Why establish a daily writing habit? Because when you give voice to your ideas, fears, hopes, uncertainties, wishes, anxieties and passions, those words that might otherwise circle your mind fruitlessly will find release on the page.

Yes, you’ll get some memories recorded and some anecdotes preserved, but the benefits of taking time to turn your thoughts into words go beyond that. They include an increased sense of focus, calm and serenity as you approach the day.

When the pandemic began last March, the writing groups I lead at a local cooperative arts studio halted abruptly, and I started offering writing prompts through a Facebook group instead. As the group’s membership grew, I realized what a broad range of friends and acquaintances were exploring my suggestion that they do more writing. Some members of the Facebook group were participants in my writing classes, but others were relatives, colleagues, and long-time friends. Soon our group had over one hundred members and ranged in age from seventeen to eighty-three.
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Earlier this fall I compiled my most popular and accessible exercises into a collection of “three-minute writing prompts.” They are designed such that some people might try out each one while others will browse for just the cues that set their imagination on fire. Whatever the approach, I’m hoping with this book to help more people explore their inner writer and realize the serenity, peace and personal fulfillment that come with regular journaling.

Click here to learn more about the book.

​I’ve long believed this is the most wonderful time of the year – not Christmas season, like in the popular carol, and not back-to-school time, as in the Staples ad, but the days before Thanksgiving when college kids come home. I loved it when I was in school, ecstatic to be back for a few restorative days, and I’ve loved it as a parent throughout my son’s first three years of college, so happy to see him once again.

But with my younger child now a freshman just returning from her midwestern university after three months away, I can’t help thinking how this would normally play out. She should be making plans with her high school gang, grabbing car keys on her way out the door as she tells us they’ll be gathering at one friend’s house and then going hiking or taking a trip into the city and then dinner with another bunch of friends and probably a late night get-together at someone else’s house.

Not this year. She returned home yesterday, lugging a suitcase plus two carry-ons, because with the advent of Thanksgiving vacation, the dorm is now closed until well into January. And the way infection rates are rising, there’s no assurance they’ll be back even then. So rather than four days’ worth of Thanksgiving vacation clothes, she staggered out of the airport toting everything she might need at home through the winter and maybe into the spring.

When my son flew home for Thanksgiving for the first time three years ago, my husband and I both jumped out of the car at the airport curb, ignoring the glare of the state trooper whose job it was to keep traffic moving as we embraced our firstborn before we all bundled back into the car together for the drive home. And that time it hadn’t even been all that long since we’d seen him, having traveled to his school for parents’ weekend just six weeks earlier.

My daughter left from this same airport curb in late August. There were no visits, no parents’ weekends, no opportunity for us to set eyes on her even if the 900-mile trip hadn’t been a deterrent. And now that she was finally back, there was no hugging or kissing or shrieking with delight at the sight of her. We tried to smile our joy as I hurried out of my car and into my husband’s while Holly took my place behind the wheel to follow us home. Knowing she was arriving from one of the most infected states in the nation, we were taking the quarantine instructions seriously – right down to the drive back from the airport, which she would have to do on her own despite being fatigued from a week of late-night studying, midterms, farewells to friends, flights, and airport layovers.

It was more strange than I could have imagined, waving to her through the doorway as she settled herself into the guest room that she’d be using until she had results from a COVID test scheduled four days hence. “Not even my own bedroom?” she asked wistfully when we discussed the quarantine protocol on the phone the week before. But no, the guest room had its own outdoor entrance and bathroom, so that was the safest option for now.

Even the traditional welcome-home dinner felt different. For my son, the first night of Thanksgiving break always meant his favorite meal. Every year he chose the same thing: hamburgers, made with our special family recipe, and apple crisp for dessert. Holly put in her request for her first meal at home weeks ago: homemade mac and cheese, with chocolate mousse pie for dessert. I smiled at her desire for classic comfort food, knowing she’d been eating mostly acai bowls and tofu-topped salads while at school.

I made the menu she requested, and since it was a somewhat mild November evening – temperatures in the high 40’s – we turned on the patio floodlights, arranged chairs at a social distance and sat outside in the dark to eat together.

While we ate, Holly told us about new friends, bike rides, favorite cafes, homework assignments, midnight pizza runs, a weekend trip up north to her roommate’s family’s lakeside cottage. Though the night air grew chilly, it was like any dinner conversation with a happy college freshman during Thanksgiving break. And as she talked, I reflected on all that had worked out just fine for her. No football games or big college parties or concerts on the quad, true. But she’d already made great friends, navigated her way around a new city, joined some clubs and learned some Arabic.

From conversations with other parents of college kids, I suspect that the current circumstances may be hardest for sophomores, who were just finding their footing back when their schools shut down in March of their freshman year and returned to campuses where everything feels sadly diminished from how it was a year ago -- if they returned at all. To my freshman, it’s all new and interesting, without much basis for comparison.

If all goes well, she’ll be notified of a negative result from her COVID test by Wednesday night. The three of us will sit down together the next day for Thanksgiving dinner, this time indoors at the dining room table. It will be different from a normal Thanksgiving, of course, without the usual relatives around to join in the celebration – and no return trip to the airport on Sunday, since the remainder of her fall semester will take place at home in front of the computer.

But it’s still Thanksgiving vacation. Our freshman is home, brimming with enthusiasm for college life. And as we celebrate Thanksgiving with her, we couldn’t be more thankful.
 
 
 

​Four days after my daughter began her freshman year in college, she called me to share both the good and the not-so-good.

“I love my roommate and we’re having fun setting up our room,” she said. “My classes are going to be hard, especially Arabic. The lakefront is beautiful. It’s sort of exhausting meeting so many new people and finding my way around. Today I cried for ten minutes and then felt better.”

Absent from her description was any mention of classes being held on a computer screen instead of a lecture hall, trying to remember names when the associated faces are half-covered by masks, or the mandatory bi-weekly appointment to have the inside of her nose swabbed. She wasn’t concerned with starting college during a pandemic. She was just airing the usual tensions of a new college freshman, far from home, excited and anxious and exhausted by the novelty of it all.

I told her about the 21-day rule, which stipulates that habits set in after three weeks of repetition. “By mid-September, it will start to seem normal. Everything that’s strange and new now will be a regular part of your life.”

And to some extent, I was right. Two weeks after arriving at school, she told me she was getting to know her way around the campus and had even explored the surrounding city a little bit. She’d started a job at a coffee shop on campus and met with the professor of her most challenging class to talk about study strategies. She and her roommate had hosted a movie night for the girls in the adjacent dorm rooms.

But on the three-week anniversary of her arrival at college, the date I told her it would all begin to feel familiar, I got a different kind of phone call: the one in which she told me that her roommate had tested positive for COVID-19 and my daughter, as a result, was being quarantined.

Just when I envisioned Holly starting to see college life as her new normal, she boarded a van which drove her to a hotel twenty minutes away from campus. There she’d stay, alone and not allowed to leave her room, for two weeks.

“Two weeks alone in a hotel room with someone delivering meals every day,” sighed my sister when I told her of Holly’s plight. “Is it awful that I’m a tiny bit envious?”

I understood. For busy parents overwhelmed by the pressures of balancing their own jobs with their kids’ virtual learning, two weeks of solitude in clean, comfortable, well-maintained surroundings with food delivery does sound somewhat irresistible.

But not for an eighteen-year-old who was just starting to get acclimated to her new environment. Abruptly, rather than counseling my daughter through mild and typical college homesickness, I was trying to help her navigate the incomprehensible territory of two weeks of solitary confinement.

Because that’s what it is, except admittedly different from the solitary confinement imposed upon actual prisoners. “It’s a really nice room,” my daughter reported the day she moved into the hotel. “I have two big beds and a desk. And a bathroom all to myself, after sharing one with five other girls for the past three weeks. And the food is way better than at school.”

But she was all alone. And of course, for prisoners put in solitary confinement, that’s the point. The worst punishment that can be inflicted upon them is to be isolated. Yet isolation was to be my daughter’s fate for the next two weeks. She had every possible creature comfort she might need – not only a comfortable bed, hot water for showers, good food, but also movies, TV shows, and constant access to her friends via all the forms of technology that kids her age use – but zero contact with other humans.

For as long as I’d been a parent – maybe even ever since my own days as a homesick college freshman – I’d anticipated the extra support she might need when she first went away to school, and I was ready with good advice. Seek out new friends. Join clubs. Attend events. Participate in activities. I thought I had all the solutions for any problems she might face this fall.

But I never envisioned the challenge of being locked in a highway hotel for two weeks.

Still, solace appeared in unexpected places. A box of chocolate-covered strawberries sent by her grandmother; a coloring book from an aunt – Holly announced that she would tape each picture to the hotel room wall as she finished it to personalize her space – groceries delivered to the front desk by her roommate’s thoughtful parents; phone calls from relatives and high school friends. 

I find myself wondering how she will look back on this. It’s easy to imagine, as my sister implied, that someday maybe she’ll be an exhausted young mother juggling work and home life and dreaming of the time she had two uninterrupted weeks in a hotel room with room service.

But it’s also possible that she’s more like a prisoner than we realize, and she’ll struggle with the memory of this total seclusion, and the overwhelming loneliness that periodically overtakes her despite the Facetime chats and online class meetings that populate her day.

Over the summer, I told Holly that going off to a college she’d never visited a thousand miles from home might be one of the biggest challenges she would ever face, but in retrospect, it seems like a challenge the same way a ropes course does: difficult and scary, but ultimately exciting and exhilarating. Her time in isolation will probably never seem exciting or exhilarating, even when it’s over.
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Nonetheless, as with any challenge successfully met, emerging from it will give her a sense of triumph. Adjusting to campus life should be a breeze after this. And maybe once she finally gets back to her dorm, despite having spent only twenty-one nights there so far, it will feel like home.
 
 

The outreach manager of our local Council on Aging called me a few months ago to tell me about a grant being offered by a regional consortium. The purpose of the grant was to fund creative approaches to addressing seniors’ loneliness and potential depression during the period of isolation brought on by the pandemic.

As she saw it, the obvious response to this grant opportunity might be to schedule lectures or seminars about loneliness and depression, or recruit a social worker to run a support group. But years of experience had convinced her that this probably wasn’t a fruitful approach. She had come to believe that when seniors are feeling isolated, lonely or generally unhappy, they don’t particularly want to talk about it, or even hear someone else try to offer insights into loneliness.

Instead, she wanted to use the grant money to help them transcend their loneliness. Knowing that my business is devoted to helping seniors write and self-publish their memoirs, she called me to ask how I might be able to help. The money wasn’t enough to cover my typical project fee for a book-length memoir; nor did she imagine that many seniors who hadn’t previously considered a project of that nature would feel ready to embark on a full-scale memoir. What might we be able to offer instead?

Together, she and I formulated a plan. What if we invited any interested senior to participate in just one interview of up to an hour? They could use that hour to tell whatever kind of account they wanted: they could talk about one time period or segment of their life, or offer a condensed overview of their entire life story.

I loved the simplicity of it. Usually my memoir projects involve an average of eight to twelve hours of interviews, followed by a lot of writing time and multiple rounds of revisions. According to this idea, the participant would have one hour to tell me the story; I’d write it up; and then the participant would have the opportunity for one round of revisions. They’d then receive a basic printed copy of their story: unlike my longer projects, it would include no fancy design or formatting work; no binding; no cover.

In order to complete the grant application, the outreach director had to be able to express just how this would address the question of loneliness and isolation. The seniors would get an hour-long conversation with me, of course, but that was only the beginning. Thinking over which story or segment from their lives they wanted to tell me would allow them to indulge in some introspection. We would encourage them to engage their family or longtime friends in the process, asking those closest to them what those potential readers would like to know more about. And once I’d written up the “mini-memoir,” maybe the participants would even choose to continue working on telling more of their story themselves.

It didn’t take more than a week or two after we announced the initiative to find ten eager seniors, and I started setting up the interviews. I was ready to give the participants some coaching if they weren’t sure what kind of story they wanted to tell, but most of them knew exactly what they wanted to talk about, and I soon discovered that the interviews went fast and fluently. Two of the participants were women in their eighties who have lived in our town all of their lives and wanted to talk about their childhoods, young married years, and all that has changed in the world around them. Another participant told the story of a particularly formative year he spent traveling and teaching in the Mideast and Europe. A woman in her seventies described her years as a young military wife living in Germany. A man who had moved recently to town talked about owning and running a popular restaurant in New York City and all the adventures that experience brought his way. One participant poignantly wanted her children to understand the emotional trauma she had suffered as the child of a single mother with mental illness and how it informed her choices in adulthood. Another woman told of how the activism of the 1960s, when she was a teenager, influenced her decision to become a journalist. A recently widowed man chose to tell the story of meeting his wife and the many interesting years they spent together. And a grandfather of nine told of his many years racing sailboats, followed by many more years teaching his four sons to sail and organizing family vacations around this passion.

As we anticipated, some participants told me their story, read through a draft, made a few small edits and then gratefully accepted their printed copy. Some wanted enough copies to distribute to their children and grandchildren, which was easily accommodated for a very small fee; one sent copies of her account of childhood to her sisters and first cousins.

But others asked for the electronic file instead, so they could keep working on it themselves. In some cases they had been planning to write a memoir for years but couldn’t get over the hurdle of starting it, and this small piece of writing provided them with a launch pad. One participant thought his story was done after I wrote it up, but his grandchildren read it and had a lot of follow-up questions, which inspired him to write more about his life on his own. Some participants shared their story with relatives, neighbors, community members or even their local library.

In summary, the benefits were just as the COA outreach manager anticipated. The seniors enjoyed reflecting on their lives and sharing their stories. The interest that family members and others took in the project bolstered their spirits, and especially for those who used this as a starting point to continue writing on their own, the project definitely met the grant’s original goal of alleviating some of the sadness and boredom of this current time of isolation.

For me, the approach was new and illuminating. I tell my regular memoir clients they can have as many hours of interviewing as they need; I’d never thought about trying to see what could be accomplished if we limited our discussion to just one hour. I liked the way each participant came to the interview with a different plan. It made me wonder if potential memoir clients who are apprehensive about getting started would benefit from this approach – try just an hour and see what you can get through.

The deliverable is a very small piece of writing, not comparable at all to my usual full-length memoir projects and lacking in design, layout and photos, but it’s an interesting alternative way to approach the idea of memoir. I’m grateful that I was given the opportunity to work with these seniors and get a new perspective on my work.
 
 Interested in knowing more about one-hour mini-memoirs? Contact me at NancySWest@gmail.com to discuss your options! 

“Go ahead and put your application in,” we told our daughter. “If you get accepted, and if it’s still near the top of your list once you hear from other schools, we’ll go visit in the spring.”

She did submit her application, and she was accepted. She read more about it and became increasingly interested even as she received acceptances from other schools, closer to home, schools she’d visited.

Enticed by the idea of wrapping up our younger child’s senior year with a family road trip, my husband and I promised her a cross-country drive over April vacation. She could tour the large midwestern university we knew almost nothing about. She could explore the city that surrounded the campus. She could get a sense of just how far it was from home, and still have a couple of weeks before the deadline to make her decision.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way. By the time April vacation week came along, we were several weeks into a statewide lockdown. We weren’t even going to the grocery store at that point, let alone driving cross country. On the same day that we would have started our highly anticipated road trip, the governor announced that public school campuses would remain closed for the remainder of the spring semester.

So no senior spring. No senior prom. No senior skip day. No all-night party in the school gym after graduation. For the foreseeable future, no graduation at all.

And, obviously, no visit to the campus she was still eager to see before making a final decision on where to attend college.

Instead, she stayed up for hours talking on the phone with her cousin, who had a bunch of high school classmates who had gone on to that same university and loved it. She pored over the description of it in The Insider’s Guide to Colleges. She perused Instagram accounts of upperclassmen at the school, and she scoured YouTube for video clips of its dorm life.

For perhaps the first time, it was a relief to me that teens saturate themselves in social media. I knew better than to trust a school’s portrayal of itself on its website; I’m a former marketing communications professional. But could a dozen sorority girls on YouTube be wrong?

“Don’t worry,” I told her as she sat with a slightly quivering hand poised over the “click” button by which she would finalize her decision and pay her deposit. “When the dust settles, maybe in late June, we’ll take a trip out there. Your decision will already be made, but at least you’ll get a look at the place you’ll be attending for the next four years.”

No such luck, of course. The dust did not settle. As the contagion numbers rose, we grew ever more wary of the idea of anyone in our family leave the house.

My daughter suggested that she and her 21-year-old brother take a quick spin out to visit the school later in the summer, after the mid-July outdoor graduation ceremony that her high school administrators had miraculously organized would take place, the kids masked and socially distanced, no mortarboard-tossing or group photos allowed. “I just can’t see arriving on move-in day without ever having seen the place,” she implored.

At that point I was beyond reassuring her. “If it seems possible,” I told her pessimistically.

By mid-July, not only were we still barely leaving our house, we no longer believed she had to worry about arriving for the start of the fall semester never having seen the place – because we no longer believed that there would be a fall semester. Every day there were new announcements of colleges making plans to be online-only for the foreseeable future. When there was no such news from her school, my husband cynically remarked that the university was staying open merely to support its revenue-generating Big Ten football team. When word came via ESPN that the Big Ten conference had canceled its fall sports season, we assumed news of the campus’s closing would come within days, if not hours.

But it didn’t. Instead, there were chatty emails from college administrators, and webinars at which the chancellor explained how campus life would function, mid-pandemic. There were instructions to get a COVID-19 test three days before traveling to campus, and another one to be conducted within two hours of arrival.

Throughout the early days of August, we waited for the email to arrive. “Unfortunately, disappointingly, in light of current statistics….”

But the email never arrived. I booked hotels for the two-day drive to and from the school and a hotel for the one night we would spend there after helping our daughter move in. And then my husband balked again, and I canceled all the hotel reservations and booked her a flight. “I could fly with her….” I suggested.

“It just doesn’t make sense, given how careful we’ve been to avoid contagion for the past five months, for you to risk it with airports and planes and dorms and restaurants,” he insisted.

And so as my Facebook feed filled with photos of my friends’ children posing in their new dorm rooms, arm in arm with their parents, I helped my daughter pack her belongings into cartons that would be shipped out to await her arrival. I rummaged up duffel bags and suitcases for her to choose among for her meager checked-luggage allotment.

And I tried to ignore my guilt. What kind of parent doesn’t accompany her child to college? What kind of mother drops her only daughter off at the airport with a quick double-parked hug and says “See you at Thanksgiving!”? How could I be doing something so seemingly callous?

But my daughter did not care. All that mattered to her was that her campus was opening up and she would be there. Earlier in the spring she’d made a rueful joke about fearing that she might earn a four-year degree from the school without ever setting foot on its grounds. “Someday I’ll find myself telling someone I went to the University of Wisconsin and they’ll say ‘Oh, I love Madison!’ and I’ll say ‘Yes, I’ve heard it’s beautiful,’” she said.

But then she was assigned a move-in date. And then that date was only a week away. And then she could see social media posts from other freshmen moving onto campus and began to believe that it was actually going to happen.

So at 5:00 a.m. on the last Thursday in August, we put her suitcase and duffel in the trunk of the car and drove to the airport. We pulled up to the curb and double parked. All three of us jumped out of the car and hugged in a tight knot in the pre-dawn gray light. My daughter put her N95 mask on, then a brightly colored cloth one over it.

Double-masked and solitary, she wheeled her suitcase through the glass doors, and we drove home.

On the way, I remembered all the disappointments she’d weathered since school closed in March. Not just the cancellation of all school-related activities, but the summer fun she’d expected to have after finishing high school as well. No trips to the beach with crowds of friends. No late-night graduation parties. No weekend getaways to someone’s family’s vacation home. We hadn’t even allowed her to continue her job as a barista at a local coffee shop.
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A miserable spring had yielded to an uncertain summer, but now fall was on the way, and with it the thrill of new beginnings. Yes, it was going to be unimaginably strange to try to meet 30,000 new people while masked. Yes, she was far from home. But at last, after five months, her wish was coming true. She was going off to college. She was boarding a plane and taking two flights to reach a city 1,100 miles away in a state she’d never set foot in.
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And she couldn’t wait another minute for her life to restart.
 

 “What you wrote about my Auntie Belle moved me to tears,” said my client, a robust 78-year-old retired computer engineer who did not look like he was moved to tears very often.
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Inadvertently, I laughed. “I wrote only what you told me about her!” I said.

“Yes, but….”

I hadn’t meant to laugh at his heartfelt words, but it did strike me as amusing that he was giving me credit for writing down the description of his aunt’s life and his relationship with her exactly as he had reported it. Why was it that reading it had moved him to tears, if what I had captured were merely his own sentiments?

But as I contemplated the question further, it began to seem more profound than just my taking credit where no credit was due. Somehow the many years he’d spent remembering his aunt, and also the substantial funds he’d donated to the program she founded and the tributes he’d paid to her in numerous ways over many decades, hadn’t affected him the same way the chapter I wrote reflecting his feelings had.

And I think this paradox reflects in some way the value of our work as memoirists. Books are, after all, one of humanity’s oldest forms of communication – not as old as the spoken word, but far more permanent. And far older than podcasts or social media posts or even oral histories preserved in any number of audio formats.

So when my client saw his ruminations on his aunt in book form, it was different for him from any of those past tributes, and he instinctively gave me credit for having created a new testimonial to her. It did not feel to me like I deserved the credit. The testimonial was all his doing – I simply created pages out of his thoughts.

But pages, it turns out, are one of our most profound media. Pages, books, words printed on paper, feel meaningful in a way no other form of communication does. Yes, it was true that my client had expressed his admiration and appreciation in many ways over the years for the smart, enterprising, courageous aunt who helped him through the grief of his own mother’s death when he was a teenager, who took him on vacations throughout the U.S. when he was young, who stood in for his mother when he got married. But he was still touched anew when he saw the chapter.

And actually, this often feels true of the memoir process. My background as a journalist reminds me that my job is to capture the client’s thoughts as faithfully as possible, and that the final product should be nothing more than a written record of what the client told me, albeit with some shaping and polishing, because that’s the privilege of a memoir writer as opposed to a journalist. So it sometimes surprises me when clients react with absolute delight – or with tears. It’s not like they didn’t know what was going into the book, I think to myself. It’s the very same story they told me.

But somehow it’s different. A story told is important, but a story written is timeless. Auntie Belle’s story exists now not only in the memories and anecdotes passed from one generation to the next but as an actual chapter of an actual book, that anyone can pick up and read any time.

We did it together, I finally tell him. The recollections were yours. I just crafted it into text. But no matter how you parse the responsibilities, the end result is a chapter paying tribute to Auntie Belle. And the fact that the chapter exists, in print, in a book, is what has moved my client to tears.

We gathered at the same church where he had worshipped for so many years, next door to the small house in which he raised his family. Grandchildren, cousins, friends, colleagues, admirers: we were there to dedicate an hour or so to honoring the life he'd lived. Facts about his life – where he'd been raised and educated, the long distances his career had taken him, the courtship with his wife, the challenges he faced in later years – unfolded, many of which those gathered already knew; but so did smaller, more colorful details: the poets he loved, the philosophers who intrigued him.
 
And then after we'd gone over the details large and small, people who knew him well told their favorite stories about him, ending with his 21-year-old granddaughter, who described the unique experience of living with him after graduating from college and coming home from her first job every night to discuss her day with him.
 
Through it all, the guest of honor sat and listened intently until it was his turn to speak.
 
Yes, the guest of honor was present. Because despite what this sounds like, it was not a funeral or memorial service, though in many ways – good ways – it felt like one, with the tributes, the shared affection, the respect paid to him. No, this was the launch party for his recently published memoir, and when he finally took a turn at the microphone, it was to read an excerpt about his childhood, more than eighty years ago, amidst the farmlands of upstate New York.
 
And it was one of his oldest friends who voiced the comparison that I always keep silently in my mind. As she began her tribute to my memoir client, she spontaneously burst out, "Oh, I'm so glad this isn't your memorial service!" The sixty or so assembled guests laughed -- but we also all agreed with her. So often, the unexpectedly interesting and colorful details of a life emerge for public consumption only when that life is over. So often, we gather at funerals or memorial services only wishing that the person being honored could hear the words of his friends and family members.
 
But this time, he could. The client was the Minister Emeritus of our small-town church, and several parishioners had urged me to help him with a memoir project. We finished it in June and held the celebration five days before his 87th birthday. In fact, before we broke for lunch and to form a line for book signings, we all sang happy birthday to him.
 
I'd like to think it was indeed a happy birthday. He deserved it. He has lived a long and complicated life, his early years marked by challenges that most of his current friends haven't heard much about, and his later years full of intellectual growth and spiritual quest that he was happy for the chance to articulate more fully in the pages of his memoir. It was a good project, one that I felt privileged to help produce. 
 
But most importantly, he was there for the celebration. Unlike a memorial service, the guest of honor didn't have to miss out on all the fun. Sometimes I say this to the adult children who approach me about helping an elderly parent with a memoir: it gives them a chance to tell the details of their life in their own words, and to hear people respond to it. And sometimes I even say to seniors who approach me about a project for themselves: Yes, do this now, tell the story your way, so that it isn't up to your children to try to remember it all later.
 
Let’s tell your story in your words, not other people’s words. Let’s give you the chance to see people learning about you and responding to your story.
 
Memorial services can be wonderful events, but book launch parties are even better. No matter who you are, no matter how old or how young, now is a good time to start committing your memories, anecdotes, and reflections to paper.
 
Need help starting – or finishing – your memoir? I’d welcome the chance to talk to you about it! Contact me at nancyswest@gmail.com !

Although the majority of my memoir projects are with individual clients, I’ve done several projects over the past few years with couples. Each member of the couple tells me his or her individual story of ancestry, childhood and growing-up years; then at some point in the narrative the two people meet. After that point they still tell their stories in their individual voices and from their own perspectives, but the material they are covering tends to converge as together they describe the years in which they’ve lived in one household together, raised a family, taken trips and pursued careers.

Recently for the first time I started a project that takes the opposite tack. Two sisters in their early seventies asked me to help them with a joint memoir. In this case it’s the first part of their story that represents a shared experience, as each one describes an individual perspective on their parents, their relatives, their neighborhood, and their childhood. Later in the narrative they go their separate ways, living in different states, marrying, raising children.

Because the primary goal of the sisters’ project is to explore their parents’ lives and values, it’s particularly interesting to work this way. Though they lived in the same household growing up, the two women had very different childhood experiences. Most notable to them is that during several summers of their girlhood, they were sent to different relatives for long stays. One sister went to their grandparents' farm, where she lived as an “only child” fussed over by numerous aunts and uncles as well as her grandparents. Meanwhile, the other sister was sent to the household of an aunt who had five children of her own to raise and lived under the aunt’s strict maternal oversight amidst a horde of temporary brothers and sisters.

Until the two women approached me about working with them, I had never thought about doing a project with siblings, but now that I’m immersed in it, I’m finding it fascinating. It’s no surprise that siblings have different perspectives on the same situation, of course, but usually I find this out only when I work with one member of a family and others later read the memoir and tell me how they remember things differently. This time I’m getting to tell the same stories from both voices at the same time.

It occurs to me also that this might be a beneficial idea for would-be memoir clients who are shy about putting themselves in the spotlight. As I often say, people in their seventies, eighties and nineties come from a modest generation; sometimes even despite their children’s entreaties, they are too humble to feel comfortable sitting down and telling me the story of their life. But, done with a sibling, it becomes a shared project and even a bonding experience, as two people learn the ways in which they remember their pasts similarly and also differently. Plus it’s fun, at least for these two; they feed off each other’s stories and have fun sparking one another’s memories.
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Do you have a sister, cousin or other close relative you can imagine doing a joint memoir project with? Are you curious to hear how other people in your family might remember the same experiences or situations as you differently? Contact me any time to talk about the possibilities!

People who know I have a business devoted to helping seniors write and self-publish their memoirs often ask me if I’ve helped my parents write theirs.

My parents would both be great subjects for memoirs. But in response, I say: “Surgeons don’t operate on their own family members.” When working with memoir clients, the more objective I can be, the better. I want to hear their stories through their eyes – without any bias of my own.

Nonetheless, that didn’t stop me from agreeing to take on a memoir project with my mother’s elder sister. Though she and I had always been close, it’s the affection of an aunt and a niece a generation apart, living two thousand miles from one another: an acquaintanceship, though fond and familiar, still limited to one or two visits a year, occasional newsy emails and phone calls when the mood struck one of us.

But as I heard her stories, my usual professional dispassion began started to corrode. We were related by blood and DNA and history, and her stories were also my stories – stories I hadn’t necessarily heard before. As she told me about her forebears, I saw my own backstory filling in with details I’d never known.

The Eastern European immigrants who took their tinker trade from the alleyways of Poland to the plains of Nebraska. The Chicago aristocrat who lived in a hotel in order to avoid ever having to learn to cook. The midwestern business executive who gave up his downtown job to become a Colorado rancher, and his wife, who left her North Shore country club circles to help transform an old silver mining town into a hub of culture and intellect.

These were my ancestors and my relatives, as well as my aunt’s.

Naturally, my mother had access to all this same family lore, and she’d passed some of it on to me over the years, but like most children, sometimes I listened and sometimes I didn’t; sometimes she told stories in logical sequence and other times she recounted bits and pieces. This is exactly what I tell my clients about why they need to commit their anecdotes to the written word – because even if you think you’ve passed it all along to the next generation, they might not have been listening all that well. It turned out I myself hadn’t been listening all that well – until I approached the same stories in my professional role.

I appreciated and loved my aunt – but I knew her the same way my own young nieces now know me: someone who has been a grownup for my entire lifetime. Not until writing the memoir did I understand her life in its full-color, three-dimensional reality. She wasn’t just my aunt, or my mother’s older sister, or my cousins’ mother. She was a young girl who learned about horses and environmental stewardship from her father. She was a teenager whose mother sent her away to boarding school when she would have much rather stayed with her family. She was a young woman whose zest for romance ran up against the era’s lack of legal birth control. She was a middle-aged mother who struggled for years to recognize her spouse’s alcoholism. She was a senior finally set free by divorce, a move back to the hometown she loved, and a septuagenarian romance she believed had been her destiny all along, leading to a third marriage shortly before her eightieth birthday.

I still maintain I could never objectively write my parents’ memoirs. And perhaps the project with my aunt was not the best example of my usual approach to work either. But I’m glad I did it. It taught me about my aunt. And it taught me about myself, in a way that I never imagined a professional undertaking could.  

Curious about how to approach your own memoir -- or that of someone else in your family? Contact me any time to discuss!