The car radio was set to my husband’s favorite station, so I automatically reached for the tuning buttons to put it back to NPR.
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But then I put my hand back down. He listens to sports radio, which from what I can tell is 24-hour coverage of guys talking about games, match-ups, plays, players, coaches, and owners. None of which is generally of interest to me.

Except that this was five days after the Patriots’ victory in the Super Bowl, and as I listened for just a moment, I discovered the two guys currently on the air were going over every single moment of the last five minutes of that cliff-hanger game.

It can’t have taken them five days to get to this part of the game in their deconstruction of the Super Bowl, I thought to myself. More likely they’ve been rehashing these same five minutes ever since Monday morning.

And then I had to listen, because their glee and delight and enthusiasm were just so infectious. My conscience told me it was time to switch to NPR and immerse myself in a solemn, important discussion about Cabinet picks, but this was just too much fun, these two grown men waxing exultant over the same split seconds of football just as they no doubt had done dozens of times in the past few days.

It reminded me that this, after all, is what I like to do best in my work life: listen to people talk about wherever it is that their passions lie.

Years ago, in a journalism course, an instructor told us, “You got a guy with a passion? You got a story.” My career has borne that out ever since, both as a feature writer for newspapers and magazines and, more recently, in my work helping people to write their memoirs. Any time someone is discussing something they’re passionate about, I’m instantly drawn in, and I become passionate about the same topic just because of their enthusiasm.

In the car that day, it was football. But the next weekend, my newspaper editor asked me to cover an automotive technology competition. Automotive technology? Me? As long as my car starts up when I turn the key, I know all I care to know about it. But no sooner did I start interviewing the teenage competitors, high school students who are studying automotive technology at their vocational high schools, than I became convinced that nothing in the world could be more interesting at that moment than advanced braking systems and tire pressure sensors.

The week before, I’d interviewed a ten-year-old cooking prodigy, and for that hour, I’d become fascinated with compotes. Another time recently, when I was working on a memoir with a couple in their eighties, the husband went off on a very long monologue about metallurgy and how it relates to the properties of crystals – the subject in which he earned his doctorate in chemistry and then built his career.

“No one wants to hear about that!” his wife admonished him impatiently. But she was wrong. I wanted to hear about it. I wouldn’t have picked up an article about the same subject and read it, but because of the passion in his voice when he described the molten metal and the crystals it formed, I wanted to hear all about it. And I wanted to write about it, to test my ability to communicate that same passion in his voice through text on a page.

You’ve got a guy with passion? You’ve got a story. That journalism instructor was so right. My career has borne it out ever since. Cooking, crystals, automotive technology, the Super Bowl. Talk to me about what you love, and I promise I’ll listen.
 

I always find it easy to explain to people why they should write memoirs, whether I’m speaking one-on-one to a prospective client, talking to an audience at a public speaking engagement, or chatting with a new acquaintance at a cocktail party. “To preserve your memories, anecdotes, recollections and stories for anyone who wants to read them,” I say. “So that people who know you now or want to understand more about your life later – children, grandchildren, future generations, colleagues, neighbors, friends – will learn about situations they may not have personally witnessed or experienced.”

And of course, it’s true. The primary reason to write a memoir – or to work with a memoir consultant like me – is to capture the details of your life: the homes in which you’ve lived, the earlier generations of your family, the trips you took, the jobs you held, the relationships you built, the challenges you faced.

It’s harder to tell them about the other benefits: the unexpected ways that preserving their story can change their life. But lately I’ve discovered that there are outcomes that I could not have anticipated myself until my clients started telling me about them.

I had one client, a 77-year-old widow, who invited me to her New England farm for our first meeting. She drove me around the isolated multi-acre property tucked deep in the mountains of New Hampshire in a Gator – a golf cart-like vehicle – explaining the significance that each garden and pond and rock outcropping held for her. Then she took me through the many rooms of her large house in even more detail, showing me her countless treasures, from collectibles to family photos to favorite furniture.

I knew I was supposed to be impressed, and I tried to respond appreciatively. But I was also a little bit dismayed. It just seemed like so much stuff to take care of, so many responsibilities for a woman in her late seventies, a two-time cancer survivor whose adult children both lived at least a hundred miles away. Even with part-time staff to help her with the buildings and grounds, I found the thought of her solitary life to be a little bit oppressive.

It took us about six months to finish her memoir: the details of her ancestry and childhood and young adult years, and then the story of her marriage and parenting years and how she came to acquire this magnificent property and all its accoutrements.

The day the book went into print, she wrote to me to share the surprising news that she had purchased a small seaside bungalow in the same Rhode Island town where her much-loved brother and sister both lived and was selling the farm.

She didn’t specifically connect her decision to the memoir, but I did. Having committed all her wonderful stories and memories to print, she no longer needed the material burden she had accumulated. With the story told, she was free to leave its props and accessories behind.

Another couple I worked with, like many of my clients, had always planned to write their memoirs themselves. For years, I’m told, they expressed the intent that they would do it – but they never quite got around to it. Then their daughter hired me to work with them, and in less than a year, their joint memoir was written. When I ran into their daughter a couple of months after I delivered the first draft, I hoped she would say they were busily reviewing it.

But what she told me instead surprised me. “My mother just finished writing and illustrating a children’s picture book about a dog,” she said. “And my father has compiled all their travel diaries into a bound collection, indexed by location, so that whenever any member of the family is traveling anywhere, they can read about my parents’ experiences there. I’m sorry we’re keeping you waiting, but I’m so pleased with everything they’re doing and I just know it’s because of the memoir. Having that finally off their plate freed them up mentally to follow all these other creative pursuits.”

While I was thinking about these unexpected ways that my clients were benefiting from their memoirs, a relative asked me if I might be able to help her write the stories behind each of the beloved works of art that she and her late husband had collected together – because once that was done, maybe she could start thinking about giving some of her art away.
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I still think the primary reason to write a memoir should be, simply enough, to preserve your memories for yourself and for other people who may wish to read about your life. But the more clients I work with, the more I realize that unexpected things happen once you get your story down. With that big undertaking completed, you start to accomplish other goals. The past having been honored and documented, it seems that life opens up in new directions. 

“Until we started this project, I had no idea how well-traveled I was,” said one of my memoir clients recently.

She confessed that she had always envied her husband – who has told her countless stories about his world travels from the years before he met her – for the many places he’s been.

But she’s a world traveler as well. She just never really took the long view on it until she started recounting various trips and treks and journeys for her memoir. Paris at the age of sixteen. Most of Western Europe’s other capitals while in college. Later in adulthood, New Zealand, Moorea, Kenya, Tanzania, Hong Kong, Nepal, Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, southern Spain, northern Italy, Australia, Sweden.

It’s hard to imagine that anyone who has been to all of these places didn’t realize until she listed them out how well-traveled she was, and yet in one respect it reflects the whole memoir process. Not until we lay the pieces out do we fully see who we are.

Many of my clients, especially women in their eighties and nineties, feel that they’ve lived fairly traditional and staid lives. “There isn’t anything very interesting about me,” they protest when they learn that their children or grandchildren have asked me to do a memoir project with them. “Nothing that anyone would want to read about.”
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“Oh, but there is,” I say with certainty. How do I know this? Because I’ve never run across a boring client yet. It’s just a matter of laying out all the pieces of their life on the table like tiles and gazing at the mosaic formed therein.

A mosaic is perhaps one appropriate metaphor for what we do when we write memoir. Put the disparate multicolored pieces together in a particular arrangement to an effect that is inevitably dazzling – not for any one of its individual tiles but for the way the pieces arranged together become luminous.

Years ago, when I used to write my dreams in a journal, I had a dream in which I went dress-shopping. But once I arrived at the store that I was sure would have the perfect dress for me, I discovered I’d been mistaken: the store didn’t sell clothing at all, only patterns with which to make dresses. I needed one perfect outfit; instead I was gazing at rack upon rack of patterns.

Perhaps that long-ago dream presaged my memoir work, so much of which involves seeing the way that patterns emerge from people’s stories. My clients don’t envision their lives as perfectly finished artifacts. They worry that they are not interesting or adventurous or well-traveled enough to make for an interesting book.

Then we lay out the pieces. We start to see the patterns, the multi-faceted glimmering mosaics formed by all the small beautiful tiles. And then the magnificence of the life lived, no matter what that life included, begins to take shape as the luminous artifact it is.