Life Story Links: May 19, 2026
“Books are like treasured memories. You find things inside them: an airplane ticket, or a ticket stub. They become little time warps. And then, when I’m gone or somebody else picks up the books, they find this little history in them.”
—Coralie Bickford-Smith
Vintage postcard with illustration of flamingos in Florida; original public domain image from Digital Commonwealth.
Personal history potpourri
WRITING BEYOND MEMORY
“I thought if I couldn’t remember the details, then I didn’t have a scene or a dependable story. That I had something incomplete, something unusable, something I needed to wait on until it returned in completion, but memory does not always return that way.”
ON RETURNING
“Old drafts remind us that we’re still here and there’s more in us and more to us and it is our privilege to keep our own hearts beating with what if?”
ARE WE REALLY DONE?
“Legacy work will always be unfinished in some way. There will always be another photo tucked in a drawer, another relative with a different recollection. The art lies in knowing when the story feels whole enough to share.” Last week I wrote about the emotional work of finishing a personal history book.
A FAMILY SECRET NO MORE
“Up until the last minutes…I wasn’t completely sure I wanted to go through with this family reunion, a century in the making. How do relatives broken by the bizarre rules of racism heal themselves after three generations apart?”
PROCESS: FIGURING IT OUT
“You’re still committed to telling his story, but you want it to be a dialogue with his book, an intergenerational conversation.” On blending family history and lived experience in memoir.
Short takes
