Most of my memoir clients want to tell the story of their life – a memoir as a chronological autobiography, essentially.

Occasionally projects come along that take other approaches, though. One example is what I call an “instructional memoir,” a personal narrative in which the subject combines a retelling of her life – or some segment of her life – with information about how to do something, offering useful instructions that the reader might be able to apply directly to his or her own life.

Last spring I started working on a book with Rachel Geller, a certified cat behaviorist and pet chaplain. Rachel was brimming with expert knowledge about cat behavior, true. So what made this more than just a “How to care for your pet” manual?

That’s where the memoir part came in. Rachel started the narrative describing how she became such an animal lover. She evoked the Maine forests and fields she walked through on her way home from school, and how stray cats who followed her home were welcome to stay – “No microchips for tracing them back to an owner in those days,” Rachel pointed out.

She also illustrated the origins of her skill at reaching out to those in need. The daughter of a popular rabbi, she frequently accompanied her father on pastoral visits. She worked in a speech pathology practice as a teenager, becoming fast attuned to the unique needs and frustrations of the patients and developing an aptitude for reaching out to them in just the way they most needed. As a young professional, she assumed guardianship of an aunt with dementia and took on the Massachusetts State House in order to get a bill passed into law regarding certain aspects of elderly care.

Rachel’s book about cats combines both instruction and memoir as she offers readers her insights on cat behavior while also using anecdotes from her life to win the reader’s trust and engagement. Working with Rachel gave me the chance to do two of the things I enjoy most as a writer: informing readers by providing tangible, useful details, but also bringing the narrator’s voice to life by drawing out her experiences and background to show her as a complete person and not just an objective commentator.

Can you imagine sharing your particular area of expertise through an instructional memoir? Did you invent something, start a business or develop a nonprofit? Have you traveled through a remarkable part of the world? Are you a skilled cook or teacher or technician – with a personal story underlying your expertise? If so, maybe an instructional memoir is the right format for your story. Please be in touch any time to talk about getting the process of your memoir started!

I had three overripe bananas – just enough for a single batch of my favorite banana bread recipe – and not enough time to get to the supermarket.

In fact, I barely had enough time to bake banana bread. But when I pulled out the recipe – which happens to live in the family cookbook my mother and I wrote together four years ago – I was reminded that a single batch can be made in one large loaf pan or three mini loaf pans. And also that mini loaves take less time to bake than large loaves, so if I moved quickly, I could easily get the entire job done before I had to leave to visit clients an hour hence.

I had been hoping to make two large loaves. I wanted one to bring to my clients, a couple in their late eighties who are almost finished with their joint memoir project; and one to deliver to my neighbor across the street, who was recovering from a bad fall on the ice. Those three little loaves, when they emerged steaming and fragrant from the oven, didn’t look quite as generous as what I’d envisioned, but now I had enough for both my clients and my neighbor – and one loaf to keep for my family.

As I set the loaves out to cool, I thought about how accurately this little triumvirate reflected my life at the moment. Clients, a neighbor, and my own household. Family, work, and community. Yes, I thought to myself, those are my banana bread recipients and also my main priorities in daily life these days.

It reminded me of a favorite Thoreau quotation: “I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Three chairs represented Thoreau’s chief interests; three banana bread loaves represent mine. In my memoir work, I talk often with clients about the material items that help reflect their story.

​Photos, of course, and favorite heirlooms: pieces of furniture, jewelry, books, pieces of art, household knickknacks.
If my house was burning down, I certainly wouldn’t grab the loaf pans. If it happened right now, I quite likely wouldn’t even care enough to grab the banana bread. Bread is a trivial item easily replicated. Never had I thought of it as reflective of my life. But today I did, and it was fun to think about what other small, seemingly insignificant items or objects reflected my character similarly. Toiletries – my favorite hair product or the Advil I take for running injuries? The lap desk that enables me to write with equal comfort on the sofa, in the car, or in the wooden rocker on our front porch? My son takes the same tattered pillow everywhere he goes – on vacations, to sleepovers, to college. My husband has a favorite hoodie honoring a Patriots championship from some bygone year.

There are so many different entry points into our stories and understanding who we are. I often ask clients to tell me about a favorite photograph in order to start the journey into their lives. But the loaf pans reminded me that there are so many other tangible items with which to start a story. If I were to write about my life in 2019, I’d write about how much I treasure my family, value my work, and enjoy my community. And today, banana bread felt like the entry point into my story.

The little loaves were not terribly generous, but the recipients were all grateful. Are there simple objects that reflect your story? Consider the ways you might use them as an entry point – and see what they have to say to you.

Are you ready to start your memoir project – or do you need help continuing it? Contact me any time to discuss how I can help you!
 

I have mentioned before that about half my memoir clients are people who have previously told me they do not need my services because they are writing their memoirs themselves.
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Usually I offer this statistic in the context of marketing: these same people often prove to be my best prospects, six months hence. I often joke about it, telling them to just keep my business card in their Rolodex – these are people old enough to know what a Rolodex is – just in case they eventually decide they could use a little help.

But what I’ve been thinking about recently is not just the barebones fact that half of my memoir clients have previously told me they’re writing their memoirs themselves and then they eventually give up, but also what they sometimes show me as the memoir work they’ve done. Typically at our first meeting they present me with a sheaf of papers, sometimes three pages, sometimes thirty. What I’m expecting when they tell me they’ll show me what they’ve done so far on their memoir is a rough draft, or a half-written book, or some substantial start to the project.

But what they usually actually have is a few random essays about significant moments from their past. They’ll show me a piece about their grandparents, or about fishing, or about a summer spent in New York City.

And then I realize why it is that they started out on the project themselves but then gave up: they’ve been working so hard on one perfect essay that they can’t imagine writing enough of these pieces to string together into a complete book. These clients may have spent weeks or even months in an adult ed narrative nonfiction class perfecting this one 1,000-word essay on fishing. How can they be expected to repeat that fifty or sixty more times to make a book? It’s no wonder they give up.

My style is different from theirs. As a journalist, I’m accustomed to collecting facts and details quickly to lay out the foundation of a story, and then asking the questions that will flesh it out. We start with those facts so near and dear to a journalist: Who, what, where, when. Then I ask them for more: more details, more memories, more description. This makes the story come alive.

It’s a different approach from drilling down into one memory, but there are plenty of ways to accommodate those previously drafted pieces as well. Sometimes I use my clients’ essays to inform myself about segments of their lives, and this helps me to know what areas to focus on; other times I’m able to include their essays in their entirety, as discrete chapters.

So the writing they did in an adult ed class or in a writing group or on their own doesn’t go to waste. And any writing is good writing practice, of course, even if the actual sentences crafted never see the light of day. But my value proposition is that I get the job done. I work from start to finish and thread together the whole story, without getting distracted trying to write the perfect essay on fishing or the impeccable description of a college trip to Europe.

I’m always happy to hear people say they’re working on their memoir themselves. Memoir writing is important and worthwhile whether you do it yourself or work with a writing consultant like me. But I’m especially happy when people who previously said they didn’t want any help reconsider. I know they’ve gotten their project off to a good start. And I know I can take that good start and turn it into a finish.

Do you have some pieces started toward your memoir project? Want to talk about how I can help you move your project along? Be in touch any time! 

Invariably, when I speak to groups about memoir-writing, a question arises that goes something like this: “What about the parts that are too difficult to tell?”

Early in my career of helping people to write their memoirs, I had a simple answer for this. “It’s your story, the way you choose to tell it,” I’d say. “I’m not a biographer or a historian. I’m not fact-checking your account. You include what you want to have as part of your story; you leave out what you don’t want included. It’s your choice.”

And for a long time, that straightforward answer seemed conclusive to me. Many of my memoir clients are strangers to me until we start working together: with no prior knowledge about their lives, I have no way of knowing what they are choosing not to tell me. I seldom even wondered if there were parts they were omitting, and was sometimes surprised to stumble upon evidence that something significant had gone unsaid, such as when a client told me all about his first wife, Karen, and his current wife, Kathy; only when a mutual acquaintance referred to Kathy as the man’s fourth wife did I realize that there were a few unaccounted-for characters missing from his narrative. And I never asked him about them, because I’m happy to let my clients decide for themselves what will and won’t be commemorated in their memoir.

But recently I’ve begun to think about this question a little differently. Now, when anyone asks me what to do about the memories they don’t want to include, I wonder to myself: Why don’t you want to include them?

This is because over the past few years, with a few dozen personal memoirs now in my portfolio, I’ve heard such a wide range of stories. Clients have told me about their first sexual experiences, substance abuse, abortions, family rifts, the suicide of a parent or spouse, lies they told, hurts they inflicted, extramarital affairs, seductions. Each story they choose to tell enhances their narrative and fleshes out their personal history.

Not everyone has the same comfort level with confessions, of course, and in some cases, the reason people find stories difficult to tell is that what happened is too sad or hurtful to relive, not because they feel guilty or morally ambivalent about what happened.

Still, I wonder how many of the people who ask me this would find that once they got started telling the easier parts of their stories, the harder parts would come more naturally. I have in fact had more than one client who led me to believe that they’d told me everything they wanted to include in their memoir, only to decide after a first draft was done that they now felt comfortable enough to tell me the parts they’d left out. So we do a second version, and that’s the one they end up presenting to their family members and friends – unless they think of still more, and then there’s a third version.

The point is, don’t let your reticence about telling some stories keep you from telling any stories. If there are parts you don’t want to include, then plan not to include them. What I have always said in answer to this question still holds true: It’s your story, the way you want to tell it. But also, don’t be surprised if your parameters shift during the telling of your memoir. As you become comfortable with the process, you might come to see that in fact every part of your past makes up who you are now, and it is that person – the cumulative character made up off all the good and bad, right and wrong, prides and embarrassments of the past – who has a story to tell.

Need help with your memoir? Contact me any time to discuss how you can get it done -- or how you can get it started! 
 

The story-telling radio show “The Moth,” along with its inspiration, “This American Life,” purports to unite several stories around a common theme each week. Often the connection seems to me to be specious at best, but themes are still an interesting way to construct stories about our lives, even if the theme is only a jumping-off point for a story that develops into something far from the original point.

Recently I’ve been thinking about the theme of unforeseen consequences, something my teenage daughter and I talked about over the weekend. She has an excellent mentor at her part-time job. This mentor has influenced my daughter so significantly that my daughter’s goals for the future and even her driving passions have changed as a result. But what my daughter does not know is that numerous people were greatly disappointed when the mentor left her previous role, believing she had been released without just cause. They felt sympathy and frustration over the situation, seeing it as entirely a negative thing. The unforeseen consequence that the story of her dismissal has for me, though, is new and promising directions for my daughter’s future. I can’t help musing over the wisdom of that old maxim about how when a window closes, a door opens.

An acquaintance told me an even more remarkable story about unforeseen consequences. After fifteen years of marriage, her husband shocked her by literally walking out the door and leaving their marriage one Saturday morning. “When he said he was leaving, I thought he meant he was going to Home Depot,” she told me. Bereft, my acquaintance flew overseas to visit her oldest friend, something that hadn’t been in her plans that year at all. The two women spent two weeks together and grew closer than they’d been since they were girls.

A year later, my acquaintance’s long-distance friend died. It was tragic, but there was some comfort for my acquaintance in knowing that she and her friend had spent so much quality time together with no foreknowledge at all that it would be the last time they ever saw each other. And what drove them together was the husband’s betrayal – something she couldn’t have possibly imagined as a positive thing at the time.

Her story continued. A few months later, my acquaintance met a new man, fell in love and married. She’s sure the new husband was a gift that her deceased friend sent her from heaven. Happy memories in the face of grief, and new love, resulted from one very disruptive deed that at the time seemed entirely without possible benefits.

Some of my memoir clients take this approach instinctively. Often they have a particular word that they want to use in their memoir title because it reflects a guiding theme throughout their life. Keeping their focus on this one word helps them to shape the anecdotes they tell. For one client, it was “resilience.” She wanted to be sure that all the chapters of her memoir related in some way to that word and that concept. For another it was “detective.” She believed that in different ways, she had sought clues throughout her life, and wanted to represent her narrative as an ongoing piece of detective work.

If you’re stalling out in telling the story of your life, think about working with a theme rather than a straightforward chronology. What unforeseen consequences have dictated your fate? What coincidences have changed the path of your life? What chance meetings opened up a new chapter for you?

The themes you could choose are countless. And the stories they generate may at first seem disparate and disconnected. But after a while, they may start to coalesce into a comprehensive narrative. You might be surprised to find out that your life story too has governing themes that go well beyond a simple linear list of dates and places.

Need help getting started – or getting finished – with your memoir? Please be in touch any time to discuss! 
 
 

At the cabin, we always used paper placemats.

I don’t know if this was because the kitchen facilities were rudimentary enough there that anything disposable was valued, or whether it was because my grandparents had apparently acquired a lifetime supply of these particular placemats and no one wanted to use them at home so the cabin was a good place to keep them. But for my entire childhood, these placemats signified a meal at the cabin, regardless of who was sharing that meal – whether it was just my family of five on one of our occasional faux-camping forays up to the mountains; or the annual summer gathering of cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents; or a special time hosting out-of-town visitors, for whom a cookout at the cabin was a necessary part of any visit to Colorado.

But after my grandparents were both gone and the Forest Service appropriated ownership of the cabin,  there were still copious quantities of unused placemats. My mother took a stack and had them laminated. I keep one of those laminated placemats and use it as a protective surface for my computer during the summer months when I work at the table in the backyard.

It's one of those iconic pieces of memorabilia with no intrinsic value – indeed, it’s a sheet of paper that could be reproduced endlessly on a color printer – but it contains so much memory value. Yet its origins puzzle me. Someone put together the artwork for this placemat decades before the existence of desktop publishing, so it must have been a fair amount of work. Presumably it was a marketing piece of some sort, promoting the existence of family cattle ranches in Colorado, and yet I can find only one reference to an organization on the entire placemat: the “Auxiliary of Cattlemen’s Association” in the introductory blurb preceding the recipes. Who created this piece, how was it distributed, and how did my grandparents come to own seemingly thousands of them? Was it something they ordered, and if so, why in such enormous quantities? Or was it sent to them, perhaps in return for trade group membership, the way charities send address labels in return for donations? But again, why so many?

As kids we loved to read the different brands, as well as the names of the towns in Colorado where all the different ranches were located. To this day, there are dozens of towns in Colorado I’ve never heard of, despite having traveled to the state nearly every year of my life. The first order of business, of course, was always locating our own family’s brand, the Mill Iron S symbol used to mark my grandparents’ cattle at Red Butte Ranch in Aspen. (Hint: It’s in the bottom row.)

Even though I have the laminated placemat in my kitchen now and can look at it every day, it still brings back vivid sensory memories of the cabin. The smell of wood smoke in the fireplace; the furriness of the cowhide rug under my bare feet; the sound of the whitewater rapids rushing by just beyond the deck outside; the taste of an icy cold can of soda lifted from the wooden barrel filled with spring water kept outside the door. And with sensory memories come more visceral ones, like the excited hilarity of our annual multigenerational “family skit night” at the cabin – one of the best evenings of the year, as far as I was concerned.

These are the kinds of objects that make my memoir clients’ accounts of their lives most vivid, and they are also the artifacts that help us most to remember. Some are valuable heirlooms; some are functional household items; some are as trivial as a paper placemat produced by the thousands. Quotidian as it may be, when I look at this placemat, I remember the cabin.

Are there items in your household that bring you immediately to another time and place? Have you written down those memories? If not, please do! Need help getting started? Be in touch any time to discuss your memoir ideas: NancySWest@gmail.com.

Not all of my clients’ memoir projects follow the same standard template, in which I write up someone’s life story based on a series of interviews I conduct with them. One client had been writing a blog about his childhood and asked me to compile the blog posts as his memoir. Another client, who ran a support group for caregivers of people with Alzheimer’s disease, wrote a weekly newsletter for her group members for two years and asked me to create a memoir out of her newsletters. Right now I’m working with a client whose memoir will consist of letters of advice he wrote to his grandchildren.

Memoirs can take many forms. Not being a very visually oriented person (not being a visually oriented person at all, my fashion-conscious teenage daughter might tell you), I think more in terms of words than pictures, but pictures can certainly be another valuable way to narrate a memoir, as any photojournalist or even scrapbooker will tell you.

Yesterday an idea came to me. I read a lot about gratitude journals, but I’ve never tried to keep one – not because I don’t believe in their value but because I feel like for me it would be almost redundant. I write in a traditional journal every morning and often mention what I’m feeling grateful for. It doesn’t seem necessary to keep a discrete list.

But I do like taking pictures. And yesterday an image I came across seemed particularly story-worthy to me. But in what format? It wasn’t multi-faceted enough for an essay, and it wasn’t whimsical enough for a Facebook post. It was just a tableau that filled me with a sudden unexpected sense of joy – of gratitude.

So the idea that came to me was to take one photo every day that expressed a daily gratitude – one image showing something, anything, about that day that reflected something for which I was feeling grateful, and include an explanatory caption.

I’m going to give it a try. Maybe it won’t be every day. Maybe it will get too repetitive: lots of photos of the fields in which I walk the dog, for instance, or the sight of my daughter getting off the school bus. Maybe it’s not even that great an idea.

But it’s another take on memoir-writing, and that has intrinsic appeal to me. There are so many ways to tell your story. If you are not a writer, maybe this idea will appeal to you more. Not a gratitude journal but a gratitude photo-essay of sorts. And for me, it’s good to push the envelope and work with images rather than words for a change. Below is my first entry. What do you think?
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As always, if you need advice, inspiration, guidance or consultation on your own memoir project – be it words, photos, or still nothing more than ideas, please be in touch any time at nancyswest@gmail.com.

A client I’ve been working with for a couple of months recently attended her 60th boarding school reunion. It was a small, close-knit group who attended, she reported back to me, and in the course of the weekend there was time for cozy round-table discussions. At one such discussion, the topic of memoirs arose. “I asked who was working on their memoir,” my client said. “It turned out just about all of us are.”
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I confess, that level of participation surprised me – but the more I think about it, the more pleasing it is. And not just from a business standpoint – as far as my client is aware, she is the only one working with a ghost writer like me; the rest seem to be slogging through their memoirs on their own.

No, what delights me is the thought that memoirs are becoming standard issue heirlooms – rather like wedding portraits or good jewelry, something that each generation simply expects to hand down to their descendants for posterity, safe-keeping and ideally treasuring.

Not many people I know have memoirs written by their grandparents, though many people wish they did – something I often remind prospective clients when they are vacillating on whether to sign on to write their own. “I’m not sure I’m interesting enough,” they demur modestly.

“If I told you that in this box was a memoir your great-grandmother had written, would you say ‘Oh, I doubt it’s very interesting,’?” I ask them.

“No,” they concede, “I’d grab it and start reading.”

Of course they would. And if my client’s reports of her fellow classmates from sixty years ago are accurate, this is an opportunity that all of their great-grandchildren will soon have.

I’m not sure when wedding photography became commonplace, but certainly all of my married friends display a wedding photo somewhere in their home, and so do the married couples I know from my parents’ generation, people now in their seventies or eighties. It would be unusual if a couple who got married within the past fifty years did not possess photos from their wedding. It’s something we expect to have access to, if our parents are married. How pleasing to think that memoirs may be reaching this same status – an artifact traditionally handed down from generation to generation, treasured for its sentiment, but not for its rarity.

My clients tend to give copies of their memoirs to their children and grandchildren. Sometimes those memoirs occupy a place of honor on a coffee table; other times they’re filed in the bookshelf with dozens of other books to be read someday.

And that’s fine. The memoirs exist and are there when would-be readers want to find them. They might be picked up no more than once or twice a year, just as wedding photos sometimes go overlooked for long periods. But the books will be there when they are wanted.

I like that idea. I hope my client’s classmates all succeed, whether on their own or with help from memoir writers like me, and I hope this trend is indicative of the future. Every young person should have the opportunity to read his or her great-grandparent’s story. I’m happy for any role I might have in helping to make that happen – or seeing it happening without any help from me at all.

Need help getting started – or getting finished – with your memoir? Please be in touch any time to discuss! 

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!