Life Story Links: January 31, 2023
“We treasure the voices of our ancestors; we warm ourselves with the worn fragments that we have of the stories of their lives. We ourselves will be ancestors one day.”
—Pat Schneider
Vintage photo of children with a puppy in New York City circa mid-twentieth century. Photograph by Morris Huberland, courtesy of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Memoirs of note
HER OWN PERSONAL ARCHIVE
Janet Malcolm “knew better than most that the only thing scarier than writing about oneself is letting someone else wrest control of the narrative.”
“THE HAUNTING OF PRINCE HARRY”
“The unlettered Prince [Harry] has gained in life what Hamlet achieved only in death: his own story shaped on his own terms, thanks to the intervention of a skillful Horatio,” aka ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer.
On permanence and legacy
AMASSING DIGITAL MEMORIES
“My intentions to document my life are pure, but as a millennial mother, if I can’t get a grip on photo organization and the sheer volume of images I snap, will all my efforts be for naught?”
HISTORY, ERASED
“To see her legacy in tatters at my feet was…a reminder of how vulnerable elderly people are when it comes to relying on successive generations to treasure what they have to pass down.”
Writing our lives
WRITING FOR THEME
“When we are our stories’ protagonists, we must project our first-person experience on that larger canvas of universal experience to show...how it connects with readers’ experience or lives.”
PRODUCTIVE PROCRASTINATION?
While researching your memoir is an intensive—and necessary—endeavor, getting caught up in a never-ending web of research will only delay your writing: Ideas for continuing (and walking away from) your personal research.
VALUE OF SELF REFLECTION
“Even if no one ever reads or listens to what you preserve, you gain from thinking about what you’re doing with your life. It isn’t too late to improve the narrative.”
WHICH MEMOIR FORMAT?
Marjorie Turner Hollman, a Massachusetts–based personal historian, shares her wisdom about how defining why you are writing a memoir will help you determine your memoir’s structure.
THE CRAFT OF MEMOIR
Award-winning memoirist and writing teacher Beth Kephart joins Ronit Plank in conversation about what distinguishes a memoir in essays, the ethics of telling other people’s stories, and much more in this episode of the Let’s Talk Memoir podcast:
Holocaust remembrance
LAST CHANCE TESTIMONY INITIATIVE
The USC Shoah Foundation plans to interview several Holocaust survivors a week at its first-ever in-person ‘memory studio’ in Los Angeles.
IN 3-D
“When we talk about millions, that’s a statistic. When we talk about one person, that’s a story.” A Miami Holocaust survivor records holographic testimony for the planned Boston Holocaust Museum.
...and a few more links
StoryTerrace’s Rutger Bruining on why it’s important to document your family history
New narrative-driven video game offering hinges on memory-keeping theme
“If You Heard What I Heard”: True stories of Holocaust survivors as told by their grandchildren
Nikole Hannah-Jones on infusing her family’s personal story into The 1619 Project docuseries
Short takes
