A family member was initially excited to sign up for Ancestry.com, but his enthusiasm soon cooled. “All I could really do with it was make a family tree,” he said. “I already know who was related to whom. I want to know how they lived.”

More specifically, he wanted to know how his grandmother had supported a family of five young children after her husband’s sudden death in the earliest days of the twentieth century. He had heard that his grandmother ran a boarding house and possibly a restaurant as well, and he had even excavated some legal records that supported this information, but that wasn’t enough.

“How did they get by?” he mused. “How did they make enough money, how did they keep themselves safe, and where did their courage and fortitude come from?”

And therein lie the shortcomings of genealogy. There’s just no good way to illustrate fortitude, spirituality, or determination on the branches of a family tree. Birth dates, death dates, immigration records, legal proceedings – none of those capture the measure of a person’s soul.

“So you wish your ancestors had written down their thoughts,” I pointed out. “Journals would answer some of these questions. Or letters.”

Or interviews. Or memoirs. None of which existed in this particular family, as far as we could tell.

Genealogy is helpful and interesting. So are the more detailed bureaucratic records that newspaper searches and immigration reports can turn up. But none will answer that critical question: What was in their souls? What did they fear? What inspired them? What gave them hope?

Maybe these questions sound old-fashioned by today’s standards. Maybe you read this and think, “Yes, of course I’d like to know what was in my great-grandmother’s soul when her house burned down and she forged ahead, or when my great-uncle arrived on Ellis Island with no contacts and no employment, but no one wants to know what was in my soul when I applied to law school.”

But of course, that’s not true. Questions about what motivates us will always be important in relation to our circumstances and our deeds. I’m currently finishing a memoir project with an 88-year-old who took up paragliding when he turned eighty. What motivated him? The belief that he could get a different perspective – literally – on the world he loved so much by hovering above it. Paragliding at the age of eighty may sound like more of a self-indulgence than a fundamental principle, but this man’s great-grandchildren will hear of his feats, see photos – and want to know what lay behind those anecdotes and photos.

This week I wrapped up a set of interviews with a client now in her late seventies who was widowed at the age of thirty-four when her husband took his own life. Their three sons know what happened to their father; he suffered from severe depression and took an intentional overdose. What they don’t necessarily know is what happened to their mother. They know the biographical basics, of course. They bore witness. She gathered them together and moved to a new city five hundred miles away, where she embarked upon a political career and married a minister.

But when she contacted me about her memoir, she confessed that she wasn’t sure she had ever communicated to them what it felt like to lose her husband at such a young age, in such a horrific manner. And if she hadn’t told her sons, how would they tell their own children and grandchildren?

Sometimes I talk to prospective clients in their seventies, eighties or nineties who feel it would be immodest to write a memoir. Raised long before blogs, Facebook posts and selfies, what feels to younger generations like self-examination feels to them more like self-aggrandizement. Or, put more simply, immodesty. Or even hubris.

But it’s not, and my job is to convince them of that. Exploring the story of their life isn’t about saying how successful or clever or admirable or impressive they were. It is, instead, faithfully recording the details of how they lived their lives – both the practical details and the intangible ones. How they recovered from tragedies. How they made sense of random acts of fate. How they interpreted the world around them, both the good and the bad.

Genealogy is a critical component of personal history. Understanding who begat whom, the who and what and when, gives us a solid foundation from which to understand ourselves and our pasts. But it is only the beginning. As any journalist knows, beyond the who and what and when lies the why. And sometimes the how. Why did they make those choices? How did they cope with their circumstances?

If you want to know this about your ancestors or even your current family members, others will want to know this about you. Now is the time to start creating your story – the details, yes, but also the nuance. Because that’s something that no genealogy website or archival newspaper records will ever capture as effectively as you will, yourself, in your own heartfelt words.

Want to get started on your memoir? Need some direction or motivation on a memoir project already underway? I’d enjoy talking to you about it!
 

When I talk to prospective clients about the process for their memoir, I usually tell them that at the first meeting we’ll create a timeline, so that I may glean a general overview of their life’s events and milestones.
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I use the word timeline, but a more accurate word might be place-line, because I find that the easiest way for most people to look at their lives from a 10,000-foot view is by listing all the places they’ve lived and then tagging specific events to each address. There’s the place where they were born, where they went to school, where their earliest family memories were formed, where they played with childhood friends. There’s their college address: the dorm they lived in, the roommates and other relationships that went with college years, the classes that stimulated them or formed the basis of their late careers. There’s the barracks where they did military service, their first apartment from which they walked to their first job. There might be a newlywed address, a first home, a second home. Maybe a retirement home.

There might be temporary addresses along the way as well: summer camp, study-abroad quarters, a hospital or rehab center; the home of friends who put them up when they didn’t have a place of their own to live. And then there’s the address from which we are writing the memoir. For some of my clients, it’s a much-loved homestead where the raised their families, but for others it’s a recently acquired retirement condo or a nursing home.

Of course, a house is much more than an address. It’s a tangible repository of memories. Often the literal structure of a house, an apartment, a dorm, even a room becomes the metaphorical structure for the memories of what happened there. One client described for me the bedroom in her family’s summer house in which she napped as a very young child….and then recounted the time she licked her hands to make handprint stains all over the wallpaper. Another client recalled the uninsulated attic bedroom in which he and his two brothers slept as boys: the brick wall was cool in the summer and warm from the chimney in the winter, so the prized spot in their shared double bed was the one closest to the wall.

More recent memories emanate from addresses as well: a client who had recently moved to a retirement community described her joy when the activities director showed her the studio in which she could spend her days painting. 

When I used to teach personal narrative classes, one of our first exercises was always “Write about your childhood bedroom.” People who didn’t know how to begin writing about their lives would immediately unblock when faced with the fun task of describing their small beds, the pictures on the walls, the books and toys on the bookshelf.

Feeling stuck with your memoir? Try a placeline instead of a timeline: a list of all the places you’ve thought of as home. Then start listing the key events that took place at which address. You’re on your way.

Need more help starting your memoir? Contact me and let’s talk about it!   

Recently I had the opportunity to listen to a podcast interview with one of my clients. At the end, the interviewer asked what advice she would give someone who was considering writing a memoir.
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Anne’s answer was immediate and unequivocal. “Hire a memoirist. They will make it happen. That's what they are there for,” she told the interviewer.

What interested me most about Anne’s quote was how definitive she was about hiring a professional. Anne, who commissioned me in 2015 to write her 95-year-old mother’s memoir, is herself an editor. Years before, she had interviewed her parents for a couple of hours and transcribed the interviews into several pages of writing, but that was as far as she got. It’s not that she didn’t have the professional wherewithal to do a project like this herself; she had simply come to the conclusion many of my clients do: If you want to get the job done – no delays, no distractions, no diversions – hire someone to do it.

When I started building my business, I imagined that the people who hired me to help them or their loved ones write memoirs would be non-writers, people with no interest or confidence in the writing process at all. After all, it makes sense that if you have no idea how to do something, you hire someone else to do it.

What I very soon came to realize, though, was that although some of my clients are indeed people with no interest in writing and no faith in their own talents, almost as many of my clients are people with plenty of editorial expertise. People like Anne, an editor; or Lucille, a client who spent several decades as a writing teacher, a newspaper editor and a freelance journalist but still hired me to write her father’s memoir. Other clients of mine do not have resumes full of editorial experience but still enjoy writing just as much as I do.

And yet Anne is right. All of them benefited from hiring someone else to get the job done. With client after client, I am reminded that the challenge in getting someone’s memoir written isn’t in how to weave the story – it’s in getting to the finish line. Many people start writing memoirs themselves. They never tell me they found it hard to get started. They tell me they found it hard to keep going – not because they didn’t enjoy the writing process but because they couldn’t find the time or figure out how to organize their thoughts.

Much as I’d like to think of myself as a talented writer, the reality is that my greatest strength might be simply that I can execute. Since I’m also a journalist for a daily paper, writing on deadline is second nature to me; I usually have less than a week to turn an article around, and sometimes less than two hours. For journalists, getting it done – far more than doing it well – is perhaps the capability that most defines our career success. And for me, it’s a skill that translates effortlessly to memoir writing.

Some of my clients know they have the ability to write their memoir but have never gotten started. Others have gotten started but haven’t gained much traction. Often they’ve taken an adult ed class in memoir and captured a few good scenes, but can’t summon the patience to repeat the process with scene after scene. Frequently, clients who have done these kinds of exercises in the past give me what they’ve written and I’m able to incorporate it into their project, blending the scenes they wrote themselves with the scenes I subsequently write.

As Anne said in her podcast interview, “Hire a memoirist. They will make it happen. That's what they are there for.” It’s true – that’s why I’m in business. Whether you are someone who wants to tell your story but has no interest at all in doing it yourself or you are someone who is eminently capable of doing it yourself, in the end it’s not a matter of whether you can – but whether you will. And if you suspect you probably won’t, then it’s time to think about giving someone like me a chance to get it done for you.

Want to know more? Let’s talk about your ideas for a memoir! 

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.

​My 96-year-old client has two daughters and a son as well as three grandchildren. As we wrapped up the final draft of her memoir, she provided favorite photos of her earlier years as well as more recent ones of her children and grandchildren. We placed the snapshots from her childhood in France and young adult years in England throughout the narrative, and my graphic designer made a two-page collage of the recent family photos to place near the end of the book.
 
I thought we were just about done, but then my client had another idea. Her son was a studio artist, and she wanted to know if we could use some images from his work as well.
 
We could, of course. The son, with help from his sister, chose some of their favorite examples of his wide range of work: a mural, an illustration,  some paintings. He furnished a photo of himself working in his studio as well.
 
I was struck by what a good idea it was on my client’s part to include these artwork images. Most people who know my client will never visit her son’s studio or see his work in a gallery or on a building exterior. But these few pages in which his work is reproduced will remind them of his talents. The quality of my paperback books certainly doesn’t do justice to full-scale pieces of art the way a real art book with oversized pages and a glossy finish would, but this format makes it accessible to anyone who pages through his mother’s memoir. Not the same as seeing the real artwork, to be sure, but a reminder of what kind of art he makes.
 
It wasn’t the first time I’d thought about the multiple purposes that memoir pages can serve. My primary goal remains to tell people’s stories through narrated text, but so many other images and ideas find their way onto these pages as well. I had one client whose daughter wanted her mother’s distinctive handwriting not to be lost to future generations, so she asked her mother to handwrite a letter for the end of the book which I reproduced as an image. The words and ideas in her letter could have been communicated just as well in regular print, but this approach captured her unique penmanship as well. Another client had a long-deceased father who had written amusing poems about his children as they grew up; my client had me copy several of his poems into her memoir. A client who had kept the toast her husband gave at their wedding decades earlier asked to have the toast reprinted in the memoir. A client who helped smuggle downed military pilots over enemy lines during World War II had images of her secret service identity cards reproduced in her memoir.
 
All of these examples remind me that while from an aesthetic point of view paperback books may not be the best medium for anything but words, books remain arguably the most accessible format we have. People can exhibit artwork, photos, even special documents in frames on their walls, but only visitors who come to their homes will see those mementos. Books make materials of every kind – narratives, yes, but also images and poems and song lyrics – available to anyone who picks up the memoir and pages through it.
 
If you are thinking about a memoir project, consider what other components you might want to include in addition to text. Snapshots, yes, but what else? Images of art, postcards, letters, poems, songs? All of it can be captured in the pages of your memoir – taking the story beyond words on paper and turning a book into something almost like a three-dimensional creation.

If you’ve ever participated in any kind of creative writing class, you have no doubt heard what is perhaps the oldest piece of advice in the realm of writing: “Show, don’t tell.”

But for some reason, sometimes even people who have accepted this advice in other forms of writing don’t believe that it applies to memoir. When I was speaking about memoir writing, and specifically about my work helping people to write and self-publish their memoirs, to a large group at a retirement community a year or so ago, one woman relentlessly pushed this point with me, asking how I, as a ghost writer, could possibly communicate the innermost feelings that her memoir would surely be expected to reflect. I explained once again my process of interviewing my clients, walking them meticulously through the stages and events of their lives, uncovering memories and anecdotes and details in order to commit their story to paper.

“But I don’t see how your retelling of what I did could possibly show how I was feeling,” she insisted.

I would argue the opposite. When clients are telling me about their lives, their actions tend to communicate how they were feeling far more accurately than any emotive adjectives or adverbs would – and my job as memoir ghost writer is to ensure that I faithfully re-create those scenes from their lives in order to reflect their emotions and moods, their moments of fear or concern or anxiety or excitement or anticipation or joy, as fully as possible.

And so when a client tells me how he or she was feeling at a particular moment and I don’t feel as if their narrative has brought us sufficiently to that emotion, I ask them to back up a step or two, describe what was going on. A client recently told me that the moment she glimpsed the man who would later become her husband, “there was a sense of immediate attraction.”

“And what happened at the moment you had that sense?” I asked her.

“We were in an art gallery when we spotted one another across the room. He ran across the floor, lifted me up and spun me in a circle. Everyone else in the room burst into applause.”

That’s a show-don’t-tell moment: the action reflects exuberance, passion, excitement and a sense of promise.

I thought of this again when a different client told me that even as a young girl attending Catholic school in France in the 1930s, she had a mischievous and slightly rebellious streak.

“What’s something you remember from that time?” I asked her.

She laughed. “The girl who sat in front of me in the classroom had long braids. Once I tied her braids to the back of her chair without her noticing until she tried to stand up.” This same client later helped smuggle downed pilots from the British Royal Air Force across continental Europe to Gibraltar, where they could board ships back to England. A rebellious spirit, indeed – and the actions to bear it out.

I think too of a client who described how as a little boy he spent hours in a grass ravine near his family’s apartment, examining every leaf, rock and insect he could find – this intellectual curiosity led to his earning a Ph.D. in physics. His wife, in turn, told me that she loved living in a tiny apartment full of relatives when she was a little girl because she could listen to the grownups talking over her as she fell asleep – and she grew up to be a lifelong extrovert, exuberant in her enthusiasm for meeting people.
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So indeed, as we look at memoir as a reflection of who we are, we might think of our innermost selves – our souls or spirits or essence – as consisting more of feelings than of actions. But I would argue that this is not the case. “Show, don’t tell” is as relevant in memoir writing as in any other kind of writing. Show me what you did, and in doing so you will find yourself demonstrating who you are and what lies in your heart. 

In spring of 2012, I was assigned to write a feature for the Boston Globe on an octogenarian who had become a Senior Olympics medalist in bicycling. As I left his home at Carleton-Willard Village, a senior graduated care community in Bedford, Massachusetts, after our interview, I thought about the other articles I had covered at that same senior community: one on World War II veterans putting together an oral history project; another on a group of women who had started a compost program and a victory garden and were supplying the kitchen with fresh vegetables all summer. “Three stories,” I mused to myself. “But dozens of residents. How many stories am I not hearing?”

I wanted to hear everyone’s stories: the defining moments of their lives, their most formative experiences. So I proposed an idea to the administration: What about a community memoir project, a compilation in which each resident who wished to participate would tell me one story from his or her life?

The administration gave me the green light. Forty-seven residents signed up, and six months later our book was in print: The Experience of Our Years: Residents of Carleton-Willard Village Remember the Moments and Events That Made Them Who They Are Today.

It was a joy to work on this project and a joy to see the finished book in print. And at the time, I thought I’d found my new career direction. Other senior communities would surely want to do their own community memoir compilation, I thought. What a wonderful way to make a living this would be.

For a variety of reasons, I soon learned that I was wrong. Other senior communities I visited, though impressed with the book and intrigued by the idea, did not have the same kinds of priorities as Carleton-Willard Village and did not feel that this was a good move for them fiscally. So instead, my memoir business grew in a different direction: Rather than community memoirs, I eventually developed a portfolio of individual memoirs, working one-on-one with clients or couples to create a book out of their life story.

And so I abandoned the idea of community memoirs at senior centers. But in spring of 2017, I was pleasantly surprised to get a call from my contact at Carleton-Willard Village. She pointed out that it was now five years since we published The Experience of Our Years. Perhaps it was time for another volume.

Sign-ups went up on the bulletin boards and I started the interviews early last summer. This time thirty residents signed up – some new to the community, others who had opted not to participate the first time around but had second thoughts after they saw the book. Once again, I heard stories about adventures and decisions, heartbreaks and triumphs, careers and families, travels and relationships. Similar themes, yet entirely different stories from the last time. The youngest participant this time was 79; the oldest, a former town clerk who won several commendations for her years of service to the town of Arlington, was 103.

The book – The Experience of Our Years, Volume II –  launched today on site at Carleton-Willard Village and at Amazon.com. I’m honored and delighted to have had the opportunity to work with the residents of this unique community once again. They are a fascinating, insightful, articulate and diverse group of men and women. Needless to say, I’m already hoping to be invited back in another five years.

Checking my book order site on this last day of the month, I see that 27 copies of Juanita’s memoir have been purchased in December. Unlike most of my clients, who go into a memoir project with the urging of their family members, Juanita was one of the few who worked with me on her memoir in secret, intending it as a surprise for her family. At a multigenerational gathering in Kentucky on Thanksgiving weekend she unveiled her newly completed project; after that word must have spread quickly, because 22 copies were ordered in the last week of November. That’s in addition to the 25 Juanita ordered from me directly to give away to her children and grandchildren at the Thanksgiving weekend gathering.
 
Juanita ordered 25 books because, like most of my clients, she envisioned a project that would be of personal interest to her closest circle: her grown daughter and son, her grandchildren, some nieces and nephews, a lifelong friend or two.
 
And like most of my clients, she underestimated. Delighted with their mother’s accomplishment, Juanita’s daughter and son quickly announced their mother’s memoir on Facebook. Soon their cousins and childhood playmates and former neighbors all wanted copies of their own.
 
Fortunately, the printing technology I use makes this easy. The state of the art of “print on demand” means that anyone can purchase a copy at any time, just as easily as purchasing any best-seller or other commercial publication on Amazon.
 
After about three years of working with seniors to write and self-publish their memoirs, one rule of thumb I’ve discovered is that every client underestimates how may people will want to read their book. “But who will read my memoir?” new clients sometimes ask me. “You’ll be surprised,” I tell them. My books are designed for easy reading. They’re light in weight and appealing in design. It’s easy to page through them, start here or there, pick them up, put them down, resume later.
 
But most readers don’t dabble in and out. Most readers consume these books from beginning to end, which attests not to my skill as a ghost writer of memoirs but to the innate curiosity nearly all of us possess about each others’ lives. Humans are curious beings. We want to know what happened, and when and how and why. That’s why we study history and biology and anthropology and psychology. And it’s why we read about one another.
 
Have you thought about writing a memoir or other personal narrative? Have you held back out of uncertainty about whether anyone would want to read it? Take heart from Juanita’s experience: 49 unanticipated readers beyond her immediate family in the first month after publication. Another client ordered twenty books for his initial print run. The printer made a trivial error in the estimated delivery date and recompensed for it by printing and shipping an extra twenty books. “I’m not sure we need an extra twenty,” I confessed, thinking that it would be more useful to me to have a credit with the printing company. But I was wrong; my client had already promised twenty more copies away as word spread of his project.
 
Not everyone wants their project to reach a general audience, of course, and that’s fine too. A small number of my clients have asked for “hidden” access, an order link available only to them and not publicly searchable. That option is easy for me to put in place from a technical standpoint, but hardly anyone takes advantage of it. Writing your memoir takes a lot of thought and contemplation, even if you work with a ghost writer. Even those clients who were on the fence about privacy when we began usually soon decide that they want their words to be read, their story to be known. That is, after all, why they chose to tell it.
 
Who would wish to read your memoir? Children and grandchildren? Siblings and spouses? Long-time friends? Colleagues? Sometimes picturing your audience is the first step toward starting your project. If you can picture just one reader, it might be time to start writing. Contact me any time to discuss a memoir project – your audience is waiting!  

​For many of us, Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends is an annual November tradition. If you are among those fortunate enough to be partaking of a holiday feast this month, take a moment to envision the gathering you’ll be attending or hosting. Who will be there? Picture the elders you expect to find yourself among. Grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, beloved family friends, elderly neighbors. What will they wish to talk about? What stories will be told? What stories will be overlooked?

Maybe you believe you’ve already heard all your parents’ or grandparents’ stories. Maybe you know all about them: where they come from, whether their childhoods were fun-filled or difficult, whom they loved, who loved them, what ground – literal and metaphorical – they have covered in the years since.

Or, to pose the fundamental question that I use when I do memoir anthologies with nursing home residents, what were the formative experiences, events or circumstances that made them who they are today?

Maybe they’ve already told you all about their lives – at other holiday gatherings, or in settings so informal throughout the years that you can’t even remember when you heard this story or that story. But could you retell the details of their stories to your own children or grandchildren? Could you explain the connections, nail the chronology, put the pieces together so that it made sense even when told secondhand?

If these questions compel you to grudgingly admit that maybe you haven’t listened to or retained the stories of your elders quite as well as you might wish, there’s no need to feel bad about it. As I often tell my clients, it’s hard to put stories in order, to provide all the context. People may lack the time or patience, whether to tell these stories or to listen to them. Or to remember them.

If you are not sure you could answer the fundamental question of what were your elders’ most formative experiences, or if you simply can’t remember some of the details along the way – what happened to their own parents, when did they make that trip overseas, what was the long-ago job through which they met their spouse – it may be time to capture the stories more formally. A family memoir is a chance for your older relatives or other loved ones to see their story commemorated on paper, with all the details they wish to share and with photos as well. In the end, in place of semi-remembered anecdotes, they’ll have a book to hold in their hands – a compiled story of just what happened when. Of what indeed it was that made them the person they are today. And you’ll have that book too.
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There are many ways to get this done. An elder person may choose to sit down and write their story out themselves. Or they may want to work with a professional memoirist or personal historian like me, experienced in asking the right questions to tease out all the right details. Some of my clients do a combination: they start by writing out some stories from their lives themselves, and then ask me for help filling in the gaps and missing details.

​Can you think of someone in your family who would like to do a memoir project? Thanksgiving and the other upcoming holidays are the perfect time to consider a project like this. I am always delighted for the opportunity to talk about memoirs. Please be in touch at any time if you’d like to talk about a possible project for yourself or for someone in your family or circle of friends.