​The questions among the mothers started early in the summer. “Are you afraid to see him leave?” we asked each other. “Have you been secretly weeping as you watch him pack? Are you dreading saying goodbye when the time comes?”
 
And throughout the summer, I’ve had to admit that no, I haven’t been feeling weepy or sentimental about my son’s upcoming departure for college. Not because I don’t love having him at home with us; not because I don’t worry, as the other mothers do, about what might happen once a child is far from home. But because my sense that this is the right thing at the right time is even more powerful than nostalgia.
 
In a way, it’s not surprising. I was never one of those mothers who posted photos of her preschoolers with captions like “Oh, please don’t grow up so fast!” I enjoyed every phase as it unfolded, but I also welcomed each new one as I watched my kids develop new skills, new interests, new kinds of independence with each year that passed.
 
But I also knew that with this, the biggest transition yet of Tim’s life, my general sense of good cheer might change. It was hard to ignore the articles flashing across my Facebook feed with headlines like “It’s normal for Moms to grieve their departing college freshmen.”
 
Would that be me, when Tim finally moved into his dorm four hundred miles south of home?
It could happen, but I don’t think so. As I write this, our family of four is packed into our Prius which is stuffed with Tim’s belongings – clothes, electronics, bedding, dorm accessories, textbooks. And so far I’m still feeling happy and excited for him.
 
Mothers say goodbye to their sons for all kinds of reasons. Mothers see sons go off to war. Or off to prison. We know mothers who haven’t lived long enough to see their sons depart for college. This was already something I’d thought about, but tragedy drove the point home to me anew last week, when a childhood friend of my husband’s lost his teenage son in a fatal accident. No, I thought, thinking back to those articles in my Facebook feed, sending a child off to college is not cause for grieving. Grief is for when you lose a child altogether. As we send our son off on new adventures, another set of parents is beginning a process of mourning that will last the rest of their lives. Our excitement on Tim’s behalf has been tempered this past week with overwhelming sorrow for our friends.  
 
I do understand why parents feel sad when a child leaves home, and my feelings might change once I see his empty bedroom. But for now, my overwhelming emotion is gratitude. Yes, I’ll miss him. He’s a joyful presence and a lot of fun to be around, and our household will feel diminished by his absence. And even having gotten this far, he’s only at the beginning; it still may not all work out according to the way he imagines.
 
But just being here to witness his dreams coming true is a privilege for me. Thanks to a combination of hard work on Tim’s part, financial planning on our part, and a huge helping of good luck, Tim is on his way, exactly in the way he’d hoped it would happen. To every thing, there is a season, as Ecclesiastes tells us. Now it’s Tim’s season to try to make his next set of dreams come true, and my season to watch with hope and love as that happens. 

​August 15 marks the ten-year anniversary of my daily running streak, or, as some of my fellow members of the U.S. Running Streak Association call it, my “streakaversary.”

And when the president of the U.S. Running Streak Association emailed me yesterday to ask me if I’d submit an update for the quarterly newsletter, my first thought was to confess that the past year has been more difficult to complete than the nine years that preceded it.

Like most runners, I’d had a variety of aches and pains over the last few years. Sciatica came and went for short time periods. Bunions threatened to form. Knee pain would exist for a day or two. But this year brought something that wouldn’t subside. When a friend commented at a Labor Day weekend party on the limp that I had been pretending not to notice, I finally Googled the painful symptoms I was only retrospectively willing to acknowledge I’d had all summer, and self-diagnosed posterior tibial tendinitis.

My husband isn’t a runner, but he is, at times, the voice of reason, and he gave me a solution. “Don’t stop running. You don’t have to break your streak,” he said. “Just take it down to a mile a day until you feel better.”

I didn’t want to cut back to a mile a day, but I didn’t want to break my streak either. So I did something I occasionally do as a last resort: took my husband’s advice. And over the next couple of weeks, logging just a mile a day, I started to feel a little bit better. I saw a physical therapist, who confirmed my self-diagnosis of posterior tibial tendinitis – “post tib,” she called it, as if referring to an old friend – and  told me to stop running. Like most streak runners, I ignored that advice, but I still got better, over the months that followed, and by Thanksgiving I was back up to two or three miles a day.

Yet I couldn’t seem to do more than that. My ability to endure longer distances – the five- to ten-mile weekend runs I had enjoyed over the past several years – seemed out of the question. It wasn’t anything orthopedic; it was something that felt somehow more intrinsic. It was as if the inner drive impelling me to run more than two or three miles at a stretch had just evaporated.

But then sometime in the spring, I noticed something else. Ever since the tendinitis had disappeared in late winter, I hadn’t had a single ache or pain. Not one. Not in my feet or ankles or knees. None of the sciatica that had recurred in occasional stints over the previous couple of years. No incipient bunion pain.

I couldn’t ignore the obvious. I was no longer running more than three miles a day, usually closer to two. My weekly average mileage was about fifteen or sixteen miles a week, whereas previously it had been about twenty-five. I couldn’t imagine ever signing up for another half-marathon or 10k. But I felt great. I was consistently pain-free in a way I hadn’t been in years.

And my pain-free status lasted until Memorial Day weekend, when, while running along a quiet country road near home with my dog, I glanced sideways to see if I recognized anyone in a group of neighbors standing in a driveway, failed to see that my dog had also stopped – broadside in front of me – to check out the same group of neighbors, and found myself airborne, sailing over my immobile dog.

Tally for that misstep: one broken rib and one sprained big toe. Both hurt a lot, but both, like all the other injuries, could be run through. If I didn’t push myself too hard.

And so here I am at my ten-year anniversary of streak running, with no particular reason or desire to stop. Actually, when I started drafting this essay, it was only August 14th, and I’d completed only nine years and 364 days of running. There was a time when I would have been far too superstitious to write about reaching my ten-year anniversary one day early. I wouldn’t have wanted to utter a word about it until my August 15th run had come and gone – which I’m happy to say that now as I post this blog, it has indeed.

But superstition isn’t really an issue for me anymore – not  because I believe if I follow enough superstitions I’ll never break my streak, but because now I know someday I will. Maybe it will be in my eleventh year of daily running, which starts today; maybe not until another decade of running has come and gone. Maybe from another bout of tendinitis; maybe another broken rib, though in fact that experience did convince me to stop running with the dog. (She gets a nice long walk every day once I get home from my run.)
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Nothing lasts forever; it’s as simple as that. The streak will end when its time has come. But ten years are behind me, and my hope is that there are another ten years ahead. For now, there’s only today’s run. And after that, tomorrow’s run. Because, of course, that’s how any streak happens. It’s how any relationship happens. For that matter, it’s how any lifetime happens. One day at a time. For as many days as it lasts.

The project began with an email from a former client named Judy who had hired me to write her husband’s memoir a year ago.
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Judy’s husband had Alzheimer’s, and although he had moved into a residential care center not long after I finished his memoir, Judy continued to attend a support group for caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s.

This time, she wanted to know if I could work with the leader of her Alzheimer’s support group. Not on a memoir, exactly: more of a compilation. Every Sunday morning, I learned, the group leader, whose name is Susan, sends out an inspirational essay to all the members of her support group and to an ever-widening network of contacts who have received the emails from friends and asked to be added to the list even if they aren’t geographically close enough to attend the group. Susan, who cared for her mother with Alzheimer’s for four years and started the group after her mother died, fills her weekly essays with encouragement, praise, and appreciation for her fellow caregivers. She uses her essays to remind her group members constantly of how hard they are working and how much she recognizes their unflagging efforts – even if the spouses or parents for whom they are providing care don’t always recognize it. She reminds them to take care of themselves, as well.

And she fills her essays with engaging metaphors and anecdotes: stories about everything from enduring a Florida coastal hurricane to cheering on her hometown Atlanta Falcons in the Super Bowl, finding ways to connect each anecdote in some way to the journey of a caregiver. She shares recollections of her mother’s final years – the delight her mother took in spotting a turtle on the front lawn or going out for fried shrimp – and frequently pays tribute to her husband Gary, steadfastly by her side during the years she took care of her mother.

And Susan brought in another element of her own life as well – her struggle with cancer. Though she had been diagnosed and treated a few years earlier, a recent recurrence was looking ominous, which was what had inspired her friend Judy to contact me about a book. Susan began undergoing a rigorous round of chemotherapy and related treatment, a process that exhausted her and sometimes dampened her spirits.

Yet on Sunday mornings, she still manages to produce an essay for her followers, every single week. Facing cancer has, in fact, brought still more perspective to her understanding of the work of caregivers. Now she knows more than ever the importance of resting, napping, and clearing one’s mind – practices she’s urged her group members to observe for years. And the now-frequent need to rely on her own caregiver, her husband Gary, is demonstrating to her that sometimes caregivers learn what it’s like to be on the receiving end of the caregiver’s journey.

Judy, Susan, and another group member worked together to dig up two years’ worth of weekly essays and email them to me. They wanted the project turned around quickly, so it was agreed that I wouldn’t do any editing beyond very basic copy-editing; Susan’s essays would be left just as she had written them. The women began sending me photos for the book as well: of each other, of their group members, of their yearly Walk to End Alzheimer’s fundraising event, and also of the Florida landscapes they all loved, so that sunsets and ocean waves and palm trees and pelicans and full moons would populate the book’s pages.

I asked if it would be possible for me to interview Susan in order to write an introduction explaining the context of the book. When we first discussed it, Susan was in the midst of a round of chemotherapy and didn’t feel well enough to talk on the phone. But in the weeks that followed, she became a little bit stronger. Not only was I eventually able to interview her for the introduction but she even supplemented my introduction with a “Dear Caregivers” letter for the front of the book that she wrote herself.

For the front cover, Susan supplied a gorgeous photo of herself and her husband walking on the Florida beach with their two beloved Maltipoo pups at their feet.

When Susan saw the completed book, she was amazed. “I cannot believe I am holding a copy of a book with my name and picture on it!,” she emailed to me when it arrived in her mailbox.

Susan’s group members, friends, and email list were thrilled to have her essays compiled into one book. Susan was surprised and touched by their enthusiasm. “This will help her through her own challenges that lie ahead,” one of her friends told me.

I agree. She still has a long haul to get through with her own treatments, and probably a lot of medical decisions to face. But now she also has her book: a lasting legacy of her important and meaningful words – plus photos and even some testimonials from her many fans about how much the group has meant to them. Susan’s legacy lies in the hearts of her friends and followers – but now also in the pages of a book. What a privilege for me to get to be part of this process.

Several years ago, when I was teaching memoir writing in an adult education program, the first exercise we’d do each term was called “Tell the Story of Your Name.”

"Who named you?," I’d ask my students. "How was your name chosen? Were you named after someone? Do you like your name? Have you ever changed your name?"

It was a comfortable way for novices to find an accessible entry into personal writing. They may have not felt ready yet to delve into complicated memories or intense emotions, but everyone could recount what their families had told them about the origins of their given name. (In my case, born to a high school teacher, I was named after Dad’s favorite student that year. The fact that I come from generations of lifelong Democrats and this particular 15-year-old Nancy happened to be a member of perhaps the country’s best-known Republican family didn’t bother my parents a whit, apparently.)

Not until recently did I think about whether we each have equally interesting memoir stories related to what other people call each other. Last week, my father was invited to give a talk at a local luncheon for senior citizens. Now long retired from teaching, he still enjoys the occasional public speaking opportunity, and my mother and I were both happy we could be in the audience that day.

A couple of minutes into the speech, my father began to cough mildly. He looked a few rows back to where my mother was sitting and called out, “Mum, could you hand me a glass of water?”

Mum, I thought to myself. Oh, dear. Now this audience of one hundred knows that my father sometimes – well, often – calls my mother “Mum.”

It was something I’d long been mildly embarrassed by. It had a certain Ronald Reagan ring to it, for one thing, and besides that it was just weird. No one else I know, other than parents of babies and toddlers who are trying to model the speaking habits they hope their small children will soon exhibit, refers to their spouse as “Mom” or “Dad.” The thought of calling my own husband “Dad” makes my skin crawl.

But I also remember a specific time when something happened that made this family quirk just a little less embarrassing. I was in college and a new friend had come home with me for the weekend. She heard my father say “Mum” and remarked wistfully, “My dad used to do that, before my parents got divorced. I miss that. Now he doesn’t call her anything directly, and when he refers to her to me, he says ‘Your mother.’”

Stories like this come up now and then when I’m working with memoir clients. I start with the same questions I gave my adult ed classes years ago: What were you named? Who named you that and why? But sometimes other stories emerge as well. An Italian immigrant in her eighties told me about how when she was growing up, every Italian family she knew has a son called Sonny. Another client said he saw it as an emblem of his complicated blended family that he had two half-brothers both named Robert.

For my part, it’s probably time for me to outgrow my adolescent embarrassment and accept my parents’ peculiar nomenclature habits.

Besides, despite what I feared, Dad doesn’t always call Mom “Mum.” When I told my sister about the speech, the cough, the glass of water, and the ensuing slip-up, she said, “Oh good; I’ll tell my kids that story. Because they once asked me if Dad calls Mom ‘Grandma’ even when there are no grandchildren around.”

So yes, what we are called matters to our story – and sometimes what other people are called becomes part of our story as well. Whether amusing, embarrassing, or just factual, it’s yet another lens through which to look at ourselves and our lives.
 

​I was vacationing in Colorado when the email from a friend of a friend arrived, but the question it posed was intriguing enough to distract me momentarily from the surrounding beauty of the Rocky Mountains.

“Did you happen to see on Facebook that I gave birth in the back seat of my car last month?” Alexa began.

Yes, in fact, I had seen the post, and marveled at the courage and capability with which Alexa and her husband Dave had brought their second son into the world on the side of a country road in New Hampshire in the middle of the night.

Alexa was emailing me not to brag, however, but to ask me if I could help her write up her birth story.

Could I? I thought about it. All of my memoir work thus far had been with seniors: people in their eighties and nineties recounting decades’ worth of stories, reflections, and lessons learned. Could I help Alexa write the story of what happened in the space of just a couple of hours as she gave birth to her son Camden?

But as we discussed ideas, I came to understand that Alexa had a bigger mission than just recounting the tale of her own son’s rather remarkable birth. Already interested in the potential of holistic birth experiences, she wanted to use her circumstances to spread the word and help give other women confidence in themselves and in their bodies as they approached childbirth. I could help her do this, she believed, if we could collect and compile a whole range of birth stories intended to illustrate the variety of experiences that women and their partners have as they bring babies into the world.

The compilation approach was familiar to me; although most of my projects are single- (or dual-) subject memoirs in which an individual or couple recounts the many decades of their lives, I’d done a few books at nursing homes and retirement communities where a large number of participants were invited to each tell me one story from their life, and the stories are them compiled into an anthology of sorts. That format could work well for birth stories, I thought: a series of stories of one or two thousand words, told in many different voices. Illustrated, of course, with adorable newborn photos.

“But where will we find people who want to tell us their birth stories?” I naively asked Alexa.

She only laughed. At the age of thirty, she was surrounded by women immersed in the process of birthing and raising young children. She was certain she could round up a pool of willing participants for me.

And she was right. Over the next six months, I heard stories of births of all kinds: births in hospitals, birth centers, homes, beds, bathtubs, labor tubs, and of course Alexa’s story of giving birth in a Subaru Outback. Our only requirement was that the women who participated believed that their experience had been positive and affirming, and could inspire other women.

It took us eighteen months to complete the book – exactly twice as long as the gestation of an actual baby – but as of this week, our newborn has arrived, and we love it already. We named it “Carried In My Body, Cradled In My Arms: Women Share Their Uncensored, Authentic and Empowering Birth Stories.”

It took my co-editor, my cover designer and me a long time to come up with the three adjectives in our subtitle. After much debate, we settled on “uncensored, authentic and empowering.” True, that’s what these birth stories are meant to be. But the more I think about it, that seems to me that those adjectives apply to my senior memoirs as well. I want readers – whether they are reading about their great-grandparents’ long lives or a stranger’s single day of labor and delivery – to believe that they are getting an informative and inspiring account that might help them to approach their own life better.

Uncensored, authentic and empowering stories of real lives, no matter what the topic or the stage of life: this is what memoir writing is all about.

Click here to see the book!

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.
 

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.