A meme crossed my Facebook feed recently in which participants posted examples of concepts from their childhoods that would be foreign to a child today. “The milkman leaving glass bottles full of milk at our backdoor,” wrote one. “Picking up the phone to make a call and having to wait for a neighbor to finish her conversation on our party line,” said an older commenter. “Racing home from school to watch TV and then put dinner in the oven before my parents got home from work—two things no kids would do today,” said another, a bit more wryly.

The phone was the source of my example as well, though from a time not as far back as party lines: “Calling a friend and being expected to make polite small talk with her mother or father before they’d put her on the line.” I watch my own kids call or text directly to their friends’ private phones and silently bemoan the fact that they’ll never have to practice the basic courtesy of chatting on the phone with random adults.

Some examples of bygone circumstances that our elders remember reach the rank of cliché: the familiar “walking ten miles barefoot through the snow to school, uphill both ways” is the obvious one. But others are subtler and more elusive. Examples come up all the time when I’m working with my memoir clients – and they aren’t necessarily the ones you’d think of first. Yes, some of my clients in their eighties and nineties remember war rationing, missing school to help with the harvest, hearing the news that a friend had polio. But sometimes examples arise in their narrative that I have to remind my clients will be interesting and novel to their grandchildren. In a project I’m working on now, a client told of arriving at a resort in Tahiti in the midst of a three-week vacation to find a letter from her father awaiting her. Though my client was more focused on describing the beaches and villages of Tahiti, I reminded her that for the benefit of her fourteen-year-old granddaughter, the excitement of arriving somewhere far away and finding a letter awaiting you merited some explanation. Now, communications from friends and family ping in on our cellphones at any time and any place, I reminded her, but before cellphones – only just over twenty years ago or so – it was still common to leave an itinerary with folks at home when you traveled, hoping they would take the time to write you a letter and figure out when to mail it by so that it would reach you at your destination.

Another client described a family vacation in the mid-1940s on which the African-American nanny wasn’t allowed to join the family in the hotel dining room because they were visiting a segregated southern city – something we can only hope would be so foreign to our children now as to require explanation. Even stories about playing in the woods with friends, unsupervised for hours on end, might have an exotic ring to a child now in grade school – or the description one client gave of visiting her fiancé at college and bunking in a professor’s family’s guest room for the sake of propriety.
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These are the most interesting aspects of our memoirs, I often remind my clients. Not just the most dramatic images: the heart-stopping moments of military warfare or the long overseas journeys by boat before airline travel was available. The moments as small as calling a friend on the house phone and chatting with her parents. The moments that simply don’t happen anymore: these are what we preserve when we write our memoirs.

Not all of my memoir clients begin their narrative with an origin story, an anecdote explaining who they are and how they came to be. But Harriet, a 92-year-old memoir client whom I worked with recently, did. In her mind, there had always been an ancestral moment that explained her character, a story that her mother had told to her and that she told to me at our first meeting.

It happened around 1903. Her grandmother, Miriam, was a young woman living in a seaside Russian village. Miriam’s husband had already immigrated to America and Miriam was ready to join him. But the ocean-liner on which she planned to make the passage wasn’t able to dock at her small village. So Miriam swam out to the ship with her two-year-old daughter, Harriet’s mother, clinging around her neck. And then they boarded the ship and crossed safely to America.

I opened the memoir with that anecdote, using it in the book just as Harriet did in her mind, to highlight the theme of courage throughout the narrative. Even the title, “Courage Is My Legacy,” refers to the origin story.

But the story bothered me. The more I tried to picture it, the more impossible it seemed. I could accept the idea that Miriam was a remarkably strong swimmer. But would she really have taken the risk of having her tiny daughter cling to her neck as they swam through the waves? How did she carry paperwork – surely immigrants didn’t board ships empty-handed, without any kind of tickets or citizenship forms? What about money? And aside from the difficulty of the swimming itself, how did a woman holding a small child possibly clamber up the side of an ocean-liner once she arrived at its hull?

I had not faced this problem as a memoir writer before. What to do if a client told me a story that seemed utterly implausible to me?

I always tell prospective clients, “Your memoir is your story, the way you choose to tell it.” Unlike in my work as a journalist, when writing memoirs I don’t fact-check or corroborate. My mission is to help people share the stories that they wish to share.

But what about a story like this that was so improbable as to be impossible to envision?   

I thought about it some more. Then I looked up some definitions of “origin story.”

“An origin story is a story that explains how a person came to be who he or she is,” said one simply worded source.
“The beginning of something; first stage or part” came by way of a more clinical definition.

And in reference to fiction, I found this description: “An account or back-story revealing how a character or group of people become a protagonist or antagonist, and adds to the overall study of a narrative, often giving reasons for their intentions.”

In reference to my client, all of those are still true even if the story isn’t, I realized. It’s not like Harriet was misremembering something she herself had done (or not done). Based on the story her mother told her, Harriet grew up imagining her grandmother swimming through the pounding waves with her toddler clutching her around the neck as they struggled to reach the ocean-liner that would take them to the New World and their new life. Did Miriam actually swim, or is it possible that she had only to wade out several yards into the water, or even crossed the distance in a rowboat, and to a small frightened child it may have seemed like swimming across the open ocean?

Regardless of the details, Miriam took her two-year-old child in tow – literally or figuratively – and crossed the Atlantic to start a new existence. She faced expanses of open ocean, whether as a swimmer immersed in the seawater or as a passenger looking out over the prow of a ship. She was probably cold at times, whether because she was soaking wet or merely hadn’t been able to bring enough layers of clothing for the sea passage. And she was no doubt frightened, whether because she was swimming through the surf with a child on her back or because she was facing a thousand unknowns once she reached the opposite shore.

My client apparently never doubted the veracity of her mother’s retelling, and although I’m curious about what really happened, it doesn’t change the significance of her origin story. In Harriet’s lineage is a thread of profound courage. It led her ancestors to the point where she was born and it has led her through 92 years of complicated living.
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Perhaps what’s missing from the definitions I found for origin story is that truth is in the eye of the beholder. As with most myths, the swim may not have happened, but the courage underlying the act unquestionably did. And that’s the part of the origin story, whether apocryphal or true, that makes it vital to who Harriet is and to the story that she tells.