Not all of my memoir clients begin their narrative with an origin story, an anecdote explaining who they are and how they came to be. But Harriet, a 92-year-old memoir client whom I worked with recently, did. In her mind, there had always been an ancestral moment that explained her character, a story that her mother had told to her and that she told to me at our first meeting.

It happened around 1903. Her grandmother, Miriam, was a young woman living in a seaside Russian village. Miriam’s husband had already immigrated to America and Miriam was ready to join him. But the ocean-liner on which she planned to make the passage wasn’t able to dock at her small village. So Miriam swam out to the ship with her two-year-old daughter, Harriet’s mother, clinging around her neck. And then they boarded the ship and crossed safely to America.

I opened the memoir with that anecdote, using it in the book just as Harriet did in her mind, to highlight the theme of courage throughout the narrative. Even the title, “Courage Is My Legacy,” refers to the origin story.

But the story bothered me. The more I tried to picture it, the more impossible it seemed. I could accept the idea that Miriam was a remarkably strong swimmer. But would she really have taken the risk of having her tiny daughter cling to her neck as they swam through the waves? How did she carry paperwork – surely immigrants didn’t board ships empty-handed, without any kind of tickets or citizenship forms? What about money? And aside from the difficulty of the swimming itself, how did a woman holding a small child possibly clamber up the side of an ocean-liner once she arrived at its hull?

I had not faced this problem as a memoir writer before. What to do if a client told me a story that seemed utterly implausible to me?

I always tell prospective clients, “Your memoir is your story, the way you choose to tell it.” Unlike in my work as a journalist, when writing memoirs I don’t fact-check or corroborate. My mission is to help people share the stories that they wish to share.

But what about a story like this that was so improbable as to be impossible to envision?   

I thought about it some more. Then I looked up some definitions of “origin story.”

“An origin story is a story that explains how a person came to be who he or she is,” said one simply worded source.
“The beginning of something; first stage or part” came by way of a more clinical definition.

And in reference to fiction, I found this description: “An account or back-story revealing how a character or group of people become a protagonist or antagonist, and adds to the overall study of a narrative, often giving reasons for their intentions.”

In reference to my client, all of those are still true even if the story isn’t, I realized. It’s not like Harriet was misremembering something she herself had done (or not done). Based on the story her mother told her, Harriet grew up imagining her grandmother swimming through the pounding waves with her toddler clutching her around the neck as they struggled to reach the ocean-liner that would take them to the New World and their new life. Did Miriam actually swim, or is it possible that she had only to wade out several yards into the water, or even crossed the distance in a rowboat, and to a small frightened child it may have seemed like swimming across the open ocean?

Regardless of the details, Miriam took her two-year-old child in tow – literally or figuratively – and crossed the Atlantic to start a new existence. She faced expanses of open ocean, whether as a swimmer immersed in the seawater or as a passenger looking out over the prow of a ship. She was probably cold at times, whether because she was soaking wet or merely hadn’t been able to bring enough layers of clothing for the sea passage. And she was no doubt frightened, whether because she was swimming through the surf with a child on her back or because she was facing a thousand unknowns once she reached the opposite shore.

My client apparently never doubted the veracity of her mother’s retelling, and although I’m curious about what really happened, it doesn’t change the significance of her origin story. In Harriet’s lineage is a thread of profound courage. It led her ancestors to the point where she was born and it has led her through 92 years of complicated living.
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Perhaps what’s missing from the definitions I found for origin story is that truth is in the eye of the beholder. As with most myths, the swim may not have happened, but the courage underlying the act unquestionably did. And that’s the part of the origin story, whether apocryphal or true, that makes it vital to who Harriet is and to the story that she tells.
 
 

I learn so much from my clients, especially those who are in their eighties or nineties, because they have lived lives very different from mine and witnessed history that I know about only secondhand if at all. In the few years I’ve been helping seniors write memoirs, I’ve greatly expanded my understanding of everything from immigration to World War II to the civil rights movement to the early days of television production.

But I get ideas from my clients, as well – and from their families. Including tribute interviews was an idea that came from a client’s children, who wanted their own chance to weigh in on their mother’s life. From that project came the idea of inviting other family members to be interviewed about what the memoir subject meant to them, what lessons they learned, what memories they cherish – now a critical component of the memoir for many of my more recent clients.

Right now I’m finishing a project with a client whose daughter-in-law – who happens to be my friend Leigh – came up with an idea that had never occurred to me before. She pointed out that there was something else unique about her mother-in-law, Patsy, besides her recollections of an unusual life and her family photos: her handwriting.

​Of course, I thought. Handwriting. What could be more unique to an individual than that?

So Leigh decided to ask her mother-in-law for a handwriting sample, though the two of us kept trying to think of something else to call it since “handwriting sample” sounded so oddly forensic, as if we were gathering evidence from a crime scene rather than commemorating a life.

We never did think of a better term for it, but Leigh took responsibility for obtaining it, and, immersed in the myriad details of readying the book for publication, I didn’t give much thought to what the handwriting sample would say. So I’m not sure whether it was Leigh or her mother-in-law who came up with the idea of Patsy writing by hand a letter to her family that would be reproduced in the opening spread of the book.

It was a wonderful idea – one I only wish I’d thought of myself, though of course not all of my memoir subjects would necessarily choose to write this kind of all-inclusive letter to their family members (and, by extension, to anyone who chose to read the memoir). From my perspective, though, almost as interesting as what the letter says is just the idea Leigh had about preserving Patsy’s handwriting. Because of course, she’s right: like faces or voices, handwriting is unique to each person, and the sight of it tends to evoke in us anything we know about the person whose handwriting it is. And like voices and faces, it can be forgotten so quickly once the person is no longer among us. My parents, my sisters, my husband, my grandparents, even my grade school friends: I hear each of their voices when I see their handwriting.
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So I’ll steal an idea from this client and encourage future memoir subjects to do the same thing – to create an image of their handwriting that we can reproduce in the book. It may not say quite as much about them as their life story itself does, but it’s yet another component adding texture and resonance to the portrait of who that person is. 

Not surprisingly, some themes and references recur consistently in my various clients’ memoir projects, especially within age groups. I’ve heard numerous recollections related to the Pearl Harbor attack, for example, or the Vietnam War.

But this week, the common theme was playhouses. Two different clients, unknown to one another, one age 83 and the other 96, both referred to the playhouses they had as children.

Both of the clients were women. Though born more than a decade apart, both were of a generation where the expectation was that they would grow up to run households of their own, so “playing house” would have been a particularly natural and expected form of play. Still, it seemed coincidental to me that each one had an actual free-standing playhouse, devotedly handcrafted by either brothers or fathers from scrap lumber found nearby, and that each one lived in a house with a yard that could accommodate such a relative luxury. One of the women even included a photo of her playhouse in the memoir.

It sometimes seems that the more memoir projects I work on, the more ideas I have for how to guide people’s memories as they pull up pieces of their childhoods or young adult years. One question that always gets the wheels turning is to ask people to describe their childhood bedroom. Sometimes their descriptions have to do with the room’s location in the house – in the attic, perhaps, or next to the kitchen – and other times it focuses on wall color or décor. One client told me about the lineup of dolls she kept on her bed, rotating the line every single evening so that each doll would have a turn at the privilege of sleeping next to her. The story amused me, because of the idea that the dolls cared who lay closest to the sleeping girl, but when the same woman talked about her impatience to have children of her own as she waited for her husband to finish graduate school, I thought again about that line of dolls in her childhood bedroom.

All kinds of settings help to set the scene for episodes in memoirs. A grandmother’s kitchen; a father’s study; a favorite carrel in the college library; a cabin at summer camp. Or a playhouse, or a treehouse. Take some time to think about the special settings in your past, and see where the memory leads you next.
 

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It was the Sunday before my son Tim’s seventeenth birthday. The two of us were traveling along a winding country road just a mile from our house, on our way home, Tim at the wheel as he usually is when we’re out together these days. I pretend he still needs the driving practice; in truth I just love getting a break from being the driver myself.

Suddenly we heard rapid honking, and as we rounded the next curve saw the reason: just ahead of us a tree had fallen across the roadway, and the car approaching from the other direction, which had stopped right at the fallen tree, was honking to warn oncoming cards.

Even though Tim was at the wheel, my maternal instincts inevitably took over and I started issuing orders. “Pull into reverse and back into that driveway we just passed,” I told him. Our section of town is laced with long, winding roads, and I was already thinking about the slightly complicated yet efficient detour that would take us home fastest once we turned around. I reached for my phone to call the police dispatcher in order to report the fallen tree and summon the DPW. I tried to remember whether I had any brightly colored blankets or clothing in the car that we could drape over the tree to alert other drivers until the DPW arrived to move it out of the roadway.

But at the same time I was reaching for my phone, Tim was parking the car and unbuckling his seat belt. “Mom, I think that guy and I can just move the tree,” he said, and took off at a jog down the road, to where the driver of the other car and his passenger were already standing.

I followed him. “That tree just barely missed us!” the driver exclaimed. “We were driving straight toward it when it fell!” I could tell he was shaken and shocked. But when the four of us all stood on the same side of the trunk and lifted it together, we were able to pivot it ninety degrees until it lay parallel to the road rather than across it. We all thanked each other, and I urged the other driver to be extra careful until his mild state of shock passed.

“I’m surprised it was light enough for us to lift,” I commented to Tim as we walked back to our car.

“It was light because it was rotten,” Tim said. “Which is also why it fell.”

Later I found myself thinking about the fact that the very same weekend, I had passed along that same stretch of roadway four other times: once running, once biking, once driving with just my husband, and once driving with my husband and both kids. That tree could have fallen on me, or on us, any one of those times. But it didn’t. I had somehow once again inexplicably been spared catastrophe.

Yet that wasn’t what I was thinking about as Tim and I continued our drive home. Instead, I was replaying that moment after I instructed Tim to back into the nearest driveway and turn around. Embarrassment, then enlightenment, then pride all hit me as I realized that at the very same moment that my thoughts were focused on calling the police, summoning the DPW and finding the best detour to get ourselves home, Tim was already moving into action to solve the problem.

He wasn’t thinking about how to escape the situation and whom to call for help. No, that was me. He was jogging toward the hazard to move it out of the way of the next oncoming driver. Tim, I recognized at that moment, is probably a better person than I am. Or if “better” is too general a term, then at least apparently a more selfless and altruistic one. Also more courageous and confident: it didn’t occur to me that I could lift a full-grown tree out of a roadway, but Tim correctly assessed that with four of us on the job, our odds of success were good.

I think every parent hopes that his or her child will be a better person than he or she is, when it comes to strength of character. I don’t have to hope; I witnessed it. He’s a courageous, helpful, determined person, or at least he proved to be in that singular moment. And even if it was a little embarrassing for me to be faced so blatantly with my own shortcomings, simultaneous with the recognition of my flaws was evidence of my son’s character. Not proof that he will always do the right thing at the right moment, perhaps, but at least a suggestion that the right instincts are present.

Coming just a week before his seventeenth birthday, I couldn’t have asked for a better gift.
 

In early July, my friend Lexie gave birth to her second child. In the middle of the night. In the back seat of her Subaru Outback, which was parked outside a convenience store. With her husband Dave assisting and their two-year-old looking on.

Everything turned out fine, and by mid-August, Lexie had decided she wanted to write about her experience. Specifically, she wanted to write what is generally called a birth story. I had forgotten about birth stories, but I was plenty familiar with them back in the years when I too was busy giving birth. Some parents find it interesting, therapeutic, entertaining, cathartic, or all of the above to write down all the details that carried them from the first contractions (or splash of water on the floor) to the baby snuggled in their arms: the story of their baby’s birth.

So Lexie asked me if I could help her with some editing. But as with so many stories people describe to me, I couldn’t keep my hands off of this one. “I don’t want to just edit it; I want to turn it into an actual book!” I told her.
Because really, who says a memoir has to be about someone looking back on years or decades? Why couldn’t I write a memoir about the first ten minutes of someone’s life?

Of course, the book wasn’t really the baby’s memoir. It was the parents’ memoir, reflecting on the twenty-four hours or so between Lexie’s first indication that her water may have broken right up to the moment when the midwife, who arrived on the scene too late to do much in the way of actually birthing the baby, helped her upstairs to her own bed. And a little bit beyond, to how her two-year-old expressed his memories of the event a couple of weeks later.

We worked together on it. We told Lexie’s story. Then I interviewed her husband Dave and wrote up his part of it. I interviewed her doula, who had been instrumental in talking them through the process over the phone and then assisting at the scene moments after the baby’s arrival. Together, the three of them each told a branch of the story that then braided itself into a narrative – a narrative about one child’s arrival into this world.

I had never thought before about helping new parents to write birth stories, but no sooner were we done than I was asking Lexie and Dave, “Do you think other parents might want to do this too?” Because it turned out to be a lot of fun. And it also felt like a kind of cosmic counterbalance to the other interviewing and writing I’d been doing this month for projects with people in their eighties and nineties, people reflecting on decades of stories and experiences. Those books will be longer than Lexie’s. Hers is a tiny book, appropriate for containing the story of a tiny baby. But it’s a book nonetheless: a keepsake commemorating the remarkable circumstances that brought her baby into existence: who helped her along the way, how she overcame her fears, and even how her memories of her much-loved younger brother fortified her resolve (and gave us our title).

What I learned from this, besides how to give birth in the backseat of a car – a skill I sincerely hope never ever to draw upon, for a wide variety of reasons – was that stories are all around me: not just with the elderly people or business leaders or mission-driven philanthropists I so often join forces with on memoir projects, but with anyone who sees something that has just happened to them as remarkable. Moreover, Lexie had a great follow-up idea: for new parents who don’t see their birth story as quite substantial enough for a stand-alone book, how about if we compile some shorter accounts in a collection of birth stories?

A while ago, I spoke with a business leader who said her mantra in developing new ideas was “You’ve got to see it to be it.” I think what she meant by this is that you have to formulate a vision of what you want to do before you can achieve it. I would respectfully disagree with her. My mantra these days seems to be more like “You’ve got to do it to do it.” I never thought of writing birth stories as part of my professional repertoire…until someone asked me to. But come to think of it, that’s how I got started with standard memoirs as well: a high school friend asked me to help her mother with a memoir project.

And so a new idea was born along with a new baby. It inspires me to think that new ideas are everywhere if I just listen for them. In a way, that’s the best thing about my line of work. I don’t really have to be out there thinking things up and envisioning dreams. I don’t have to “see it to be it.” I just have to open my mind and my ears to the ideas that find their way to me.

(Lexie’s book is on Amazon – click here!)

The opportunity existed for us to leave town for the holiday weekend. I had confirmed weeks ago that no one would be using the family vacation home in Maine, and that we were welcome to spend the long weekend or any part of it there by the ocean. The idea seemed even more promising once a weather forecast was issued in the middle of last week: hot, sunny weather stretching from Friday through Monday and beyond. But the plan never quite materialized. Though I felt ready for a quick escape, Rick had been away for most of August and relished the thought of some time to attend to projects at home.

My Facebook feed was full of friends’ holiday weekend photos. Some were at lake homes or out on motor boats. Others were hiking in the White Mountains or catching enormous fish in rushing rivers.

But as I looked at my kids, who were doing none of the above but didn’t seem to have a complaint in the world, I remembered that if there’s one thing I’ve learned from my memoir work and helping people look back over lives that are often eight or nine decades long, it’s that the best memories often have nothing to do with being at the ocean for a holiday weekend. “My father lost his job during the Great Depression, and looking back as an adult, I know my parents must have been under a great deal of stress, but what I remember about that time is playing Parcheesi, popping popcorn, and listening to band concerts on the radio,” said one client recently.

And, of course, there’s always the possibility that what we would have remembered most from a Labor Day weekend getaway was the endless traffic jams that inevitably bookend a sunny New England weekend.

Instead, on Sunday evening, we bought tuna subs and went to a local pond not ten minutes from our house. It’s a place usually favored by families with very small children, because the water is warm and shallow, and we hadn’t been there in years, but somewhat to my surprise, the kids didn’t express the slightest hesitation about going. They put on their bathing suits and rummaged up beach towels. Once there, they made their way to the water’s edge together and started digging in the sand.

I can no longer tell myself that there will be lots of other Labor Day weekends for family trips to Maine or other long-weekend getaway destinations. Tim is starting his junior year; if all goes according to plan, two years from now he’ll already be away at college by Labor Day weekend. It’s quite possible, hard as it is to believe, that this was our second-to-last Labor Day spent together as a family, and our main activity was a picnic and swim at the local pond.

But it just didn’t seem to matter. I don’t know if my kids will ever write memoirs, but if they do, I’m almost sure they’ll remember digging in the sand and eating tuna subs ten minutes from home just as enthusiastically as they might have recalled a more grand-scale weekend getaway. They were happy and they were having fun. And what I’ve learned as I interview more and more people of all ages for memoir projects is that fun and happiness are what sow the seeds for long-lasting memories, regardless of their source.

All the other kids playing on the beach by the pond as the sun started to set appeared to be at least a half-decade younger than my children. Any other teens by the water that evening were there on dates, not with their parents and siblings. And Tim is surely the only kid in his peer group who would both chauffeur his family to the pond and build sand castles once he got there.

There will be other chances for family vacations and getaways. Sometimes the memories made close to home are the best ones of all.

Gradually, over the past month, the possessions we’d long stored in boxes in the basement of our rental house have emerged and found their place in our new home. Our silver, generously polished by my mother, is arranged in our new living room. The wedding china fits perfectly in the kitchen hutch. Built-in bookshelves provide space for all our favorite books. I’m happy to see all of these cherished items unearthed after so many years.

But it was the sight of our many family photos that almost brought me to tears.

It had been so long since we’d displayed family photos, other than the occasional snapshot from a recent vacation or the kids’ yearly school pictures. Many of our possessions had remained in storage from the time we’d sold our own home throughout the four years we lived in a rental house, because each time we re-signed the year-long lease, we thought we’d be staying only one more year, and we told ourselves it wasn’t worth the trouble to unpack all those boxes.

But now I can’t stop gazing at the arrangement of family photos that my husband and daughter finished setting up last weekend, because I had no idea how much I’d missed them.

When I thought about it, though, I realized that it had actually been well over four years since I’d seen these photos. The last house we owned was on the market for nearly a year, and our realtor had told us early in the staging process to put away all family photos. “You want potential buyers to picture themselves in this house, not you,” she said. “When people see personal things like photos around, it feels too much like another family lives here.”

At the time, it seemed like more random advice that realtors give – no different from putting out fresh flowers or toasting almonds before an open house to emit an aroma of baking – but ironically, only now that we ourselves live in a house that recently belonged to someone else and those same photos I once had to hide away grace our new rooms do I realize how right she was. Seeing those images again gives our family a tangibility that I didn’t even realize was missing during the years the photos were in storage.

Because at the time, I told myself I didn’t care about all those belongings relegated to the basement. Not having our wedding china out meant we didn’t feel obligated to do formal entertaining. Keeping the telescope unassembled and packed away gave us an excuse to put off learning about astronomy. And the photos were one less thing to dust, I rationalized.

Once or twice while we lived in the rental house, I did say to Rick, “It would be nice to have just one wedding portrait out.” But he pointed out that finding one wedding portrait would probably mean unpacking and repacking five or six boxes, since we hadn’t labeled them all that carefully, and I always gave up on the idea before I got around to doing the actual work of finding the picture I wanted.

But indeed, not having the familiar photos of gatherings, parties, vacations, beach trips, bike rides, sledding, and holidays made me feel as if my family was, on some level, an artifice. It somehow seemed fitting that the only photos in our home during that time were the annually reconstituted school photos, as if we as a family were as superficially posed and falsely colored as those maddeningly fake images, with their comb marks showing in the kids’ normally uncombed hair and the anodyne plum-colored background screen.

Now the family photos are out once again, and like the Velveteen Rabbit, I feel real again. Yes, my family is all around me in the flesh just as it has always been, but also in reflected images of so many happy times from the past. Perhaps that shouldn’t matter. Perhaps all that should really matter is the real living versions of ourselves, not the framed images.

But somehow it does matter. Just as our realtor said, having photos around the house makes it seem like a family lives there. And in this case, now that we are settling into a home where we plan to stay, rather than trying to attract potential buyers to one we need to leave, that’s precisely the feeling we want. 

The year was 1937. Her future husband spotted her across the room at a college party. They danced, but he never caught her name. Later, he described her to a female friend, who said she knew exactly whom he was describing – and inadvertently gave the name of a different girl. Then he saw the right girl again months later walking past the fraternity house. This time he asked a different friend if he knew who she was. He did – she was his sister. But the friend played it coy and refused to say so, claiming afterwards that he believed if the pair were meant to meet, it would happen without his help. So it was months before the couple finally connected – and years more before they were married.

But as my memoir client starts telling me this story for the third time, I try not to sigh. We’re on a schedule of interviewing for one hour a week, by phone because she lives in New York, and it’s been seven weeks so far. I had been hoping to finish a first draft in August. But this client speaks slowly, though very clearly. She’s a wonderful story-teller and remembers captivating details. Nonetheless, hearing the story for the third time, with so much left to go in the narrative of her ninety-five years, feels a little like spinning our wheels.

Then something catches my attention. A detail she hadn’t included before. And another one. An account of the job she held while he attended classes. A side story about how much she wanted to be a mother and how frustrating it was to wait while her husband finished graduate school before they could start a family.

This is the same basic account I’ve heard before, I realize as she’s talking, and yet each time a few more details emerge. And it occurs to me that during the many hours of the week that pass between our weekly phone calls, she must be thinking about these segments of her life, going over them again in her mind, remembering a little more each time.

Remembering anew what it was like to meet her husband, to begin their courtship, to embark upon married life, to have the children she longed for. Remembering times – and people – long gone.

And it all reminds me that while the main purpose of these memoir projects is what I rather clinically call “the deliverable” in my contract – that is, the bound and printed book – the process is perhaps as important as the product to some of my clients. Telling their story, and having me hear their story, may be as valuable to some of them as the book itself.

A little less than a year ago, my husband Rick and I came up with the idea that I should do a memoir project with his 91-year-old grandmother. The odd thing was that later, neither of us could really remember what gave us that impulse at just that time, or why we never thought of it earlier. The idea just dawned on us one day, and I started interviewing her a couple of weeks later. Her book was completed fairly fast – which turned out to be very good luck, since although she was in reasonably good health as we embarked upon the project, she unexpectedly passed away days after I finished writing it.

Rick came up with a theory, though, about how the inspiration came out of nowhere to do this project. He thinks it was his grandfather’s idea. His grandfather had died four years earlier, but Rick thinks on some spiritual plane, his grandfather put the idea in our heads, believing it was important for his wife to tell the story of her life one last time, to go over each detail from start to finish, to describe her girlhood, parents and siblings and friends; her education; her marriage; her years of raising children; her intense spiritual journey as a devout Catholic. To know she was heard.

It reminded me not to try to hurry my current client, even as she repeats anecdotes, sometimes with new details and sometimes without. It’s important to her to tell the story. It’s the story of her life, but telling it to me is part of her life’s journey as well. I’m listening carefully, and soon her daughters and granddaughters and other family members will be able to read it in printed form. So we’ll take our time, week by week, hour by hour, for as long as it takes for her to tell me this story. The process of telling it matters. As much, perhaps, as having it told.

“We’re minimalists by nature, and besides, we’ve lived in our current home for only four years, so moving should be easy.”

Oh, how naively I uttered those words, countless times between when we unexpectedly found our perfect house this past spring and our July 1 moving date.

In retrospect, it reminds me a little bit of expectant parents who tell you about their birth plan, stipulating music that will be played, aromas wafted, and meditations conducted to ensure that they have the perfect birth. In reality, childbirth is hard no matter how carefully you plan for it -- and so is moving.

Now that we’ve spent a full two weeks in our new home sorting through vases and bowls and books and photos and kitchen accessories and bike equipment, calling ourselves minimalists seems like truly a stretch of the imagination. As I contemplated how to relocate ourselves and our possessions into a new home exactly half the size of our last home -- and even less than half the size of the home we owned before that -- I could only dream of being the kind of people who can relocate into a San Francisco-style “micro-apartment” or a renovated shipping container. Taped-up boxes surrounded us, hemming us in, tripping us, creating walls and forts and barriers throughout the rooms. Where could it possibly all go in our downsized home? And if it couldn’t go anywhere, what would we do with it instead?

As my family and I sorted through the items that we’d used or displayed or stored in our last house, and still more items that we’d never unboxed from our previous move four years earlier, I found myself generally thinking one of two phrases, as each item emerged from its packaging. In some cases, it was “Oh, I love that painting/pitcher/photo/serving platter!” But a lot more often, it was “What were we thinking?”

It’s been eye-opening to me over the past couple of weeks to see how possessions pile up even for people who consider themselves fairly ruthless about getting rid of things. And in our new World War II era house with almost no closets, no usable basement, no garage, and a minuscule attic, I find myself flummoxed.

Deciding what to keep among functional household items is one thing. In the kitchen, I simply applied my sister’s clever rule for decluttering: allow nothing in your kitchen that serves only one infrequent purpose. With that, farewell to the pineapple corer, the corn-on-the-cob plates, the vertical chicken roaster, the bread machine. That part was easy. I know what I use regularly in my kitchen, and I felt very little sentimentality for the items I don’t use.

But it gets trickier with objects that have memories attached: carved wooden animals from our African safari; bright purple and yellow glazed pots from the kids’ pottery classes; hand-painted tiles we bought in a shop in Amsterdam in which chickens roamed the aisles.

Additionally, there are objects that represent memories of other people. My husband’s grandmother liked to collect random china teacups on her travels, and many of those teacups were bequeathed to us. His grandmother is gone now, and we both want to remember her. But is holding on to unmatched teacups that we really don’t have space for the right way to do it?

As someone who makes a living helping people write their memoirs, it’s easy for me to claim that none of these material objects matters as long as we have written records of our lives. But of course, I have photographer friends who would say it’s the photographs that best reflect our lives. Friends who are painters who would say it’s paintings that preserve our memories. Even “crafter” friends who make quilts or knit sweaters to preserve memories.

It’s difficult to make the final cut. But I remind myself that other people can make use of our material objects when we can’t. Extra coffee mugs went to a neighbor’s son who is setting up his first post-college apartment. Other kitchen items will go to a local charity that helps formerly homeless people stock their new homes. Clothes that our tiny 1940s-era closets can’t accommodate will be sold by Goodwill, the profits used to help other people in need.

I hope I’m right, that it’s the written word – or photos or paintings or other creative endeavors – that ultimately matters most when it comes to preserving our memories. I hope I don’t regret any of the items we’re giving away.

I don’t think I will, though. In my line of work as a memoir writer, I listen to a lot of people reminisce. “I wish I could better remember….”, they sometimes say. Or “I wish I’d asked….” Or “If only I knew more about…”

But they never say “I wish I still owned.” Not about a bread machine. Nor a pineapple corer. Not even a hand-painted tile from the Netherlands. And most of those things can be replaced if we miss them too much. But somehow I just don’t think we will.

“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.