Recently I’ve gotten to know two professional organizers/ downsizing consultants, Laura Moore of ClutterClarity LLC and Wendy Arundel of The Mudroom. The two of them have very different business models and work styles from each other, but in talking to both of them, I’ve found interesting points of intersection between my work and theirs.

In some ways, it’s not surprising at all. To start with the most obvious point, there’s a significant demographic overlap in our clientele. I work almost exclusively with seniors in their seventies, eighties and nineties; though both my personal organizer friends have clients of all ages, they frequently work with seniors in the process of selling homes and downsizing.

But in that same commonality lies an interesting difference, which Laura pointed out to me recently. Seniors who commission me to help tell their story through self-published memoirs are often at a peaceful, contented place in their lives, one in which they feel happy to be recounting their histories, or are feeling flattered that this is something their children urged them to do, or are excited at the thought of creating this unique gift for their families, or simply find it gratifying to have someone – me – visiting with them regularly for the sole purpose of hearing about their lives.

For Laura, on the other hand, clients this age are often at a bit of a crisis point. Often people don’t hire personal organizers or move managers until they believe they have a problem they need to solve. They feel pressured to clear out and sell their home, or they are anxious about the constrictions of moving into a much smaller space. Unlike me, she is more likely to meet them at a high-stress time in their lives than a reflective one.

But in the best-case scenario, our work overlaps at a point of symbiosis. Decluttering is difficult for all kinds of people; particularly so for seniors, because for them it’s often less about sorting through paperwork or ridding one’s closet of outdated fashions than it is about getting rid of a lifetime of keepsakes: treasured objects that no one else really seems to want or value.

But sometimes, where Laura and Wendy leave off is right where I pick up. Seniors who move to condos or assisted living centers or in-law apartments in their children’s homes can’t bring all their treasures with them, but they can bring their memories. So sometimes, the goal of memoir writing becomes to turn material treasures into written reminiscences.

Mostly, this works in symbolic ways. Clients tell me the stories of their past and then find that with all the details recorded on the written page, it isn’t so important to them to have the tangible items anymore. Chapters about travel replace the need for souvenirs from around the world. A description of the meals a long-gone mother used to cook makes it easier to dispense of old, seldom-used but sentimentally valued cookbooks. A narrative about the writer’s wedding day can free her up to finally hand the crumbling lace wedding veil over to a granddaughter who will repurpose it for a crafts project.

But sometimes we do this in tangible ways: what Laura has dubbed “memoirs of stuff,” almost like an art catalogue from a gallery, in which a client describes in meticulous detail the history and provenance of a number of favorite possessions or pieces of art, and then feels finally comfortable giving away or selling those possessions because she has the book explaining each object’s importance.

I was surprised, a year or so ago, when a client whom I’d met with several times in her elegantly appointed but very large and mostly uninhabited home emailed me the week after her memoir was published to tell me she had decided to sell the home. She had never mentioned this possibility while we were working on her book. And when she told me, she didn’t overtly draw any connection between finishing her memoir and taking the enormous but potentially rewarding step of giving up her home for someplace smaller, easier to maneuver around and closer to family. But I sensed a connection anyway. She’d told me so much about her home, and all of it was included in her memoir: now she could comfortably leave it behind.

The timing isn’t always right for my organizer friends and me to try to share clients. My memoir clients aren’t necessarily quite ready to think about moving. And the organizers’ downsizing clients may be too preoccupied with the logistics of moving to invest time in the more meditative process of telling me their story. But the overlap exists nonetheless. Telling stories can release our need for material objects, and the stories live on for as long as we want them to – without requiring anything more than an inch or two of shelf space in a bookcase.
 

​“You made it so easy,” marveled one client who finished writing her memoir with me recently.

“I put a lot of work into it, but it was all worth it,” said another client not long ago.

Two very different reactions. So which is it when you write your memoir? Is it easy, or is it a lot of work?

I like to think that I can make it easy for my clients, of course. That’s essentially the value proposition of any kind of consultant: we make the process go more smoothly for the client, regardless of what the nature of the endeavor might be. But in reality, it’s whatever the client chooses for it to be: as easy or as difficult as you want to make it.

That’s not meant to sound threatening. I don’t mean difficult in the onerous sense; I mean more in the sense of how intricately you choose to immerse yourself in the details. For many of my clients, the whole project of completing a memoir takes little more than four to six hours of interviewing, a couple of read-throughs, a couple sets of revisions, and an hour or two choosing two dozen favorite photographs from throughout their lifetime. My graphic designer never fails to please with her first draft of a cover; the client and I both do a final round of proofreading, and we’re done.

In that sense, writing your memoir is easy.

But some clients need more time and more immersion in the process, and that’s fine too. After all, writing your memoir shouldn’t be a trivial undertaking. It requires consideration and contemplation. For some people, that comes naturally throughout the interview process, but others need to think and rethink how they will talk about certain segments of their lives.

Meanwhile, many clients bog down in the photo-selection phase: with shoeboxes full of old snapshots, they become overwhelmed by the task of choosing just twenty or thirty to include in the book. When that happens, I encourage them to try to choose photos that tag specifically to anecdotes and references within the text, or I help make the choices myself. With one client who couldn’t even face the task of going through boxes of old photos, I simply took my portable scanner to her house and walked around removing her favorite snapshots from walls and tabletops, scanning them right there and then, and thereby including in her memoir just those photos that she loved most.

Depending on who you are, how you see your life story, and how you approach the process, you might be someone who finds it easy or you might find it difficult. What I can promise, though, is that I do all I can to make it as carefree as possible for each client. After all, we all know how to write. If I didn’t offer the value proposition of making it simpler for you, you could just as easily do it yourself.
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My goal is to facilitate the process, whether that means making it easy or just making it less difficult. Are you uncertain about whether this is a challenge you are ready to take on? Let’s take it on together and find out.