Life Story Links: January 3, 2023

“Love is listening.”
—Titus Kaphar

Vintage photo of kids on a cold New York City day, created by Morris Huberland between 1940-1979, courtesy of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Meditations on memoir

TURNING PERSONAL NARRATIVE INTO ART
Might we see memoir as a “collaborative inquiry, author and reader facing the same questions from inside their inevitably messy lives”?

NEW YORK MAG PICKS BEST MEMOIRS OF 2022
“Call it hybrid memoir, memoir-plus, researched memoir—the industry hasn’t quite decided—but the blending of personal history with careful analysis of the cultural forces and institutions that inform it has exploded the genre with possibility.”

SCARS TELL A STORY
“Let it play out on the page,” Patricia Charpentier, a Florida–based life writing coach, says of the prompt she discusses in this episode of her Life Writers Vlog: Write about a scar (physical or emotional).

Preserving personal stories

PERSONAL ACCOUNTING
Lamorna Ash’s 2022 diary ran to 52,000 words. “I’ve been toying with giving up my chronic chronicling, perhaps even deleting the evidence,” she writes, “but something always stops me.”

THE WAY YOU TELL YOUR LIFE STORY MATTERS
"Even if no one reads or listens to your tale, you haven’t wasted your time. Reviewing your life…might give you the inspiration to mend some of your ways. It isn’t too late to improve the narrative.”

LOST TO HISTORY, NO MORE
“Much of [animator Bessie Mae] Kelley's story and work was lost to the pages of her own journals and left undocumented—until now.”

Stories and substance

ANIMATED AGAIN
In rare home movies (now archived at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), Harry Roher’s camera captured what life was like for people in a small community in then Poland, now Ukraine, in 1936.

YOUR MEMORIES, THEIR CLOUD
“As I grappled with all the gigabytes, my concern morphed from losing it all to figuring out what was actually worth saving.” A critical look at storing digital photos and other artifacts of your memories in the cloud.

CARRYING THE DREAMS OF HER FAMILY MEMBERS
“By collecting the images and storing them together in that suitcase, Brooks had created a kind of narrative. It fell to her granddaughter to place it within the larger history of humanity.” Poet Robin Coste Lewis’s family album.

SACRED KEEPSAKES
“When we share a story about another, we invite them back into life.... We ‘remember’ them in this way. Transitional objects provide the opportunity to speak the loved ones’ name, to tell a bit of their story once more.”

THINGS THEY KEEP
In this special episode of Things That Matter with Martie McNabb, six guests from The Quietus House (hosts of a healing grief retreat in February) share things they hold dear that remind them of lost loved ones:

Cook up some memories

PRESERVING RECIPES
“The weakest ink, it turns out, is in fact better than the strongest memory, which is why many people who value recipe preservation view their written-down recipes as family heirlooms.”

FAMILY HISTORY THROUGH FOOD
When her parents wrote essays for their Chinese heritage cookbook, “some of the stories that we had heard were more vividly on display than what we had ever heard around the dinner table...[as] the medium required that we kind of render it in a lot more detail.”