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!
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recently I’ve gotten to know two professional organizers/ downsizing consultants, Laura Moore of ClutterClarity LLC and Wendy Arundel of The Mudroom. The two of them have very different business models and work styles from each other, but in talking to both of them, I’ve found interesting points of intersection between my work and theirs.

In some ways, it’s not surprising at all. To start with the most obvious point, there’s a significant demographic overlap in our clientele. I work almost exclusively with seniors in their seventies, eighties and nineties; though both my personal organizer friends have clients of all ages, they frequently work with seniors in the process of selling homes and downsizing.

But in that same commonality lies an interesting difference, which Laura pointed out to me recently. Seniors who commission me to help tell their story through self-published memoirs are often at a peaceful, contented place in their lives, one in which they feel happy to be recounting their histories, or are feeling flattered that this is something their children urged them to do, or are excited at the thought of creating this unique gift for their families, or simply find it gratifying to have someone – me – visiting with them regularly for the sole purpose of hearing about their lives.

For Laura, on the other hand, clients this age are often at a bit of a crisis point. Often people don’t hire personal organizers or move managers until they believe they have a problem they need to solve. They feel pressured to clear out and sell their home, or they are anxious about the constrictions of moving into a much smaller space. Unlike me, she is more likely to meet them at a high-stress time in their lives than a reflective one.

But in the best-case scenario, our work overlaps at a point of symbiosis. Decluttering is difficult for all kinds of people; particularly so for seniors, because for them it’s often less about sorting through paperwork or ridding one’s closet of outdated fashions than it is about getting rid of a lifetime of keepsakes: treasured objects that no one else really seems to want or value.

But sometimes, where Laura and Wendy leave off is right where I pick up. Seniors who move to condos or assisted living centers or in-law apartments in their children’s homes can’t bring all their treasures with them, but they can bring their memories. So sometimes, the goal of memoir writing becomes to turn material treasures into written reminiscences.

Mostly, this works in symbolic ways. Clients tell me the stories of their past and then find that with all the details recorded on the written page, it isn’t so important to them to have the tangible items anymore. Chapters about travel replace the need for souvenirs from around the world. A description of the meals a long-gone mother used to cook makes it easier to dispense of old, seldom-used but sentimentally valued cookbooks. A narrative about the writer’s wedding day can free her up to finally hand the crumbling lace wedding veil over to a granddaughter who will repurpose it for a crafts project.

But sometimes we do this in tangible ways: what Laura has dubbed “memoirs of stuff,” almost like an art catalogue from a gallery, in which a client describes in meticulous detail the history and provenance of a number of favorite possessions or pieces of art, and then feels finally comfortable giving away or selling those possessions because she has the book explaining each object’s importance.

I was surprised, a year or so ago, when a client whom I’d met with several times in her elegantly appointed but very large and mostly uninhabited home emailed me the week after her memoir was published to tell me she had decided to sell the home. She had never mentioned this possibility while we were working on her book. And when she told me, she didn’t overtly draw any connection between finishing her memoir and taking the enormous but potentially rewarding step of giving up her home for someplace smaller, easier to maneuver around and closer to family. But I sensed a connection anyway. She’d told me so much about her home, and all of it was included in her memoir: now she could comfortably leave it behind.

The timing isn’t always right for my organizer friends and me to try to share clients. My memoir clients aren’t necessarily quite ready to think about moving. And the organizers’ downsizing clients may be too preoccupied with the logistics of moving to invest time in the more meditative process of telling me their story. But the overlap exists nonetheless. Telling stories can release our need for material objects, and the stories live on for as long as we want them to – without requiring anything more than an inch or two of shelf space in a bookcase.
 

​“You made it so easy,” marveled one client who finished writing her memoir with me recently.

“I put a lot of work into it, but it was all worth it,” said another client not long ago.

Two very different reactions. So which is it when you write your memoir? Is it easy, or is it a lot of work?

I like to think that I can make it easy for my clients, of course. That’s essentially the value proposition of any kind of consultant: we make the process go more smoothly for the client, regardless of what the nature of the endeavor might be. But in reality, it’s whatever the client chooses for it to be: as easy or as difficult as you want to make it.

That’s not meant to sound threatening. I don’t mean difficult in the onerous sense; I mean more in the sense of how intricately you choose to immerse yourself in the details. For many of my clients, the whole project of completing a memoir takes little more than four to six hours of interviewing, a couple of read-throughs, a couple sets of revisions, and an hour or two choosing two dozen favorite photographs from throughout their lifetime. My graphic designer never fails to please with her first draft of a cover; the client and I both do a final round of proofreading, and we’re done.

In that sense, writing your memoir is easy.

But some clients need more time and more immersion in the process, and that’s fine too. After all, writing your memoir shouldn’t be a trivial undertaking. It requires consideration and contemplation. For some people, that comes naturally throughout the interview process, but others need to think and rethink how they will talk about certain segments of their lives.

Meanwhile, many clients bog down in the photo-selection phase: with shoeboxes full of old snapshots, they become overwhelmed by the task of choosing just twenty or thirty to include in the book. When that happens, I encourage them to try to choose photos that tag specifically to anecdotes and references within the text, or I help make the choices myself. With one client who couldn’t even face the task of going through boxes of old photos, I simply took my portable scanner to her house and walked around removing her favorite snapshots from walls and tabletops, scanning them right there and then, and thereby including in her memoir just those photos that she loved most.

Depending on who you are, how you see your life story, and how you approach the process, you might be someone who finds it easy or you might find it difficult. What I can promise, though, is that I do all I can to make it as carefree as possible for each client. After all, we all know how to write. If I didn’t offer the value proposition of making it simpler for you, you could just as easily do it yourself.
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My goal is to facilitate the process, whether that means making it easy or just making it less difficult. Are you uncertain about whether this is a challenge you are ready to take on? Let’s take it on together and find out.

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