“I can see why you like doing this work,” said my 95-year-old client, speaking in the slow, measured manner to which I’d become accustomed in our previous three interviews, as she told me about her childhood in the Illinois farmlands and then a cross-country move with her mother and brothers to the Pacific Northwest. “When I’m in the car, I like looking at different houses and trying to imagine who lives here or there, what their life is like. That’s sort of similar to what you do.”

She’s right. It is similar to what I do, except I don’t have to just imagine. When I first meet my memoir clients, they are like those houses, and I might spend some time trying to imagine what lies within and what their lives are like, but in time I get to find out. Are they content with their lives? Introspective? Philosophical? Complacent? Disappointed? Proud?

I noticed that a client whose memoir I recently completed used one adjective more than any other when talking about her life: “wonderful.” She used lots of other words too, but more than anything else, the word she used to describe her life was “wonderful.” Would I have guessed that from looking at her?

Maybe. But sometimes I have no idea what kinds of pasts and stories people are harboring until we start talking. When I did a community memoir at a nearby retirement center, in which almost fifty different seniors each sat down for 20 minutes to tell me one story from their lives – it was kind of like Speed Dating, only it was Speed Narrative – I would sometimes watch them come in, study their names on the sign-up sheet, imagine what their story might be. “World War II, something about the Navy and seeing combat as a young man,” I imagined as I studied one elderly gentleman making his way into the conference room. And I was partly right – he was a combat veteran of the Navy. But that’s not the story he chose to tell me. He told me about making the decision after his military duty ended to go to music school and learn to play the drums. “Being a good wife and busy mother,” I imagined as a woman in her early eighties sat down across from me for her interview. But again, no – she told me about realizing the morning after her daughter died in a climbing accident that she herself needed to leave a long-time physically abusive marriage.

My client was right when she said my work is like looking at houses and trying to guess who lives within. And just as with houses, you can never be sure. You can look at a house, or a person, and make some guesses, even some inferences. And then they start talking, and you find out just how un-guessable each person’s story ultimately is.

“I made good money that year and bought my first car,” mused my 94-year-old memoir client. “It was a little car with a soft top and the spare tires on the side. To start it up, you had to choke it. It wasn’t like now where you just turn the key in the ignition or push a button. I taught my wife to drive in that car. Then I bought an Oldsmobile. It was a ’52, a beautiful car. 165 horsepower, and that was a lot of horsepower at the time.”

I listened and typed in time with his words and hoped he would soon get back to the topic of building his business from the ground up. That was the topic I really wanted to hear about at the moment.

But then something occurred to me. None of my clients had ever talked about cars before, and for that matter, I had never thought to ask about cars. Cars are not generally a topic of interest to me, and they don’t hold much of a place in my own bank of memories. But I had been holding an invisible bias all this time, assuming cars weren’t worth talking about in a memoir.

That evening, I looked over the words I’d taken down during the morning’s interview, and phrases started emerging from the reminiscences about the car. “I made good money that year.” With not so much as a college education, he had built a thriving business that had supported a family of five. “I taught my wife to drive in that car.” His wife died of cancer, but every time he spoke of her, he referred to how beautiful she was and how much he loved her. “It wasn’t like now when you just turn the key or push a button.” Indeed, he had known much more difficult times, and the car embodied the many ways in which simple tasks like driving required more effort and more attention than they do in today’s high-tech world. It must seem strange to him that I don’t even have to find my keys before I turn the car on: merely having them in the bottom of my purse is enough for the car to know to start itself up. What an astounding – and perhaps sometimes bizarre – array of changes he has seen in 94 years.

And when he got to the part about the Oldsmobile, his daughter, who had joined us for the interview, recalled a song her parents used to sing to her when they drove in that car, and that reminded him of a song his mother used to sing to him when he was a toddler.

Stories and more stories emanated from the memories of two cars. It was a reminder to me that by asking the questions I find most interesting – questions about families, about relationships, about traditions, about travels, about child-rearing – I might be overlooking other questions. I’ve never asked memoir clients about their first – or second or third – car, but I think now I will. Some people might be like me and not think cars have much to do with major life themes. But to this client, cars led the way to a multitude of stories.