Life Story Links: December 2, 2025
“Anyone who has survived childhood has enough to write for their entire life.”
—Flannery O’Conner
Vintage family photo
Where memories reside
AN AVALANCHE OF BOOMER STUFF
“The delicate dance around family dynamics of inheritance and gift-giving among generations is an awkward one for a multitude of reasons, perhaps most importantly, that nobody really wants to think about their ultimate demise or that of their loved ones.”
OUR BODIES HOLD OUR STORIES
“Somatic Semiotics™ is the name I am giving to this truth. It is the study of how the body communicates in signs and signals long before we consciously craft a narrative, a drop in the stomach, a clenched jaw, a wave of heat when you try to speak a truth you were taught to swallow. These are not accidents, they are the body’s early drafts.”
LIMITED EDITION
“Through candid yet unsentimental photography, [Nadia Lee Cohen] captures the rhythms of rural heartland life, weaving together fragmented childhood memories with the present-day reality of four generations living side by side.”
Personal history miscellany
A DOSE OF INSPIRATION
Last week I shared four quotes from my commonplace book—I hope they remind you why family history and stories of our ancestors matter (and why now is always the best time to delve in).
FROM KITCHEN TO STAGE
“We, as descendants of Africa who were taken, can only [trace our roots] back so far. I think I’ve always longed for that bigger and deeper and more ancient connection.” An ‘immersive adaptation’ about African American cuisine.
NOW STREAMING
A new documentary, A Road Trip to Remember, charts a journey across Australia as actor Chris Hemsworth and his father confront the realities of Alzheimer's and the ways in which memory loss alters everyday life.
PART OF THE UNESCO MEMORY OF THE WORLD REGISTER
A new exhibition, The Recordings: Voices from the ShoahTapes, is now on view at the New York Historical until March 29, 2026. The audio recordings—which were not originally created for publication—document the many conversations that Claude Lanzmann and his assistants had in the 1970s and early 1980s during several years of research on the film Shoah (1985). The recordings are part of the Jewish Museum Berlin collection and will be fully accessible online by 2027.
...and a few more links
Short takes
